


we two, a lovers' coup

by villanellogy



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, DIY ear piercing (don't try this at home), Emotional Couple Conversations™, F/F, Post S3, Smut, badass gadgets? check, because obviously, carolyn's in this now too please enjoy, dramatic fake proposals? check, eve polastri's eyebrow journey, more tags to be added as we go along, ostensibly this has a plot but mostly they are in love, presidential alert: the girls are kissinggg, sometimes...murder....is foreplay, stories about college eve? check, the more tags:, there's some basic couple angst but they remain in love because this is not the L word, twitter endangering lives? check
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:54:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25079470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villanellogy/pseuds/villanellogy
Summary: Eve has been in fourteen countries in the last three months alone, logging hours on planes, trains, and one particularly horrible boat ride in a freak thunderstorm. She has been fake-proposed to in five-star restaurants, and has eaten sweet briouat on the side of a dusty thoroughfare. She has killed two people, and likely been marked for death by an international assassin ring. She is trying to learn French because it would make a woman smile.-Alternatively: what comes next for two dangerous, smart, and enamored women.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 78
Kudos: 393





	1. LAVAL

**Author's Note:**

> Me? Writing a multi-chapter fic? Perish the thought. I've got this all outlined, somehow, and two more chapters fully written. Look at what Killing Eve has done to me. WITHOUT FURTHER ADO: 
> 
> **LAVAL: Which Treats Of Faux-Proposals, Introspection, Seduction, Fugitive Email, Orange Juice, and Twitter Mistakes**

When their entree plates, scraped clean, are cleared away, Villanelle lays down her fork delicately. She clears her throat, takes a small square box out of the inner pocket of her tailcoat _(her fucking tailcoat),_ and kneels next to the table. Eve immediately buries her face in her hands.

“You know, we can afford to _buy_ dessert and champagne,” she hisses through her fingers, looking down to where Villanelle is opening the box to show one of Eve’s own rings, probably swiped from the bathroom counter earlier, displayed prettily on black velvet. It’s not even a particularly nice one; she’d bought it at some tourist market in Casablanca because it had caught her eye, reveling in the sun-soaked afternoon and in the high of being on the run. They have begun to attract attention, diners at nearby tables nudging each other and pointing in their direction.

“But this is _so_ much more fun,” Villanelle whispers back with a wink, peeling one of Eve’s hands away from her eyes and pressing it to her lips. When she speaks again, it is at a volume sufficient enough for the nearby onlookers to hear, voice suffused with the utmost romance. “Clara Kim,” she says, using the name which appears on the passport and credit cards in Eve’s purse. “From the moment I met you in a bathroom, of all places, I knew that you were a woman to die for.” She winks again. God, is she laying it on thick. “The path has not been clear of obstacles.” Understatement of the year. “But we found our way to each other in the end.”

Villanelle’s eyes are shining with unshed tears, her tone throaty with emotion. Usually, Eve can tell when she’s putting it on, but in these moments, she’s never quite sure. “You were made for me,” she finishes, “and I was made for you, and I would be honored if you would agree to become my wife.”

The entire restaurant is watching with bated breath. Eve could crawl under the creamy linen tablecloth and stay there for an hour. The worst part is that despite the fact this is the third time Villanelle has pulled this particular stunt, her words still prompt a slight lump in Eve’s throat, because god _damn_ it if they aren’t true. Still, she won’t give Villanelle the satisfaction, so she just meets her eyes and nods. 

The whole fucking room goes nuts.

“One of these days I’m going to say no when you do that,” Eve murmurs against Villanelle’s mouth, after she’s been pulled up from her chair and kissed soundly, her ring transferred from the box onto the fourth finger of her left hand. Villanelle giggles and, because she apparently learned all of her romantic gestures from aged Hollywood films, dips her lightly like they’re dancing to kiss her again. The pop of a cork startles them apart, and suddenly champagne flutes are on the table, and Eve and Villanelle (or rather, Clara and Élodie) have once again become engaged.

x

“You know, they could have sprung for Dom,” Villanelle says airily, as she takes Eve’s hand while they leave the restaurant, having been plied with champagne and tiramisu and the congratulations of their fellow restaurant patrons. “This is the happiest day of our lives so far, after all.”

Eve rolls her eyes. “Only the most irritating epicure would _complain_ about having been poured a bottle of Veuve Cliquot at no cost to her.” Due to the half-bottle of effervescence suffusing her bloodstream, she’s feeling a little light-headed and a lot like pressing Villanelle into the brick wall of a nearby alley steeped in shadow. “Are you trying to propose to me once on every continent, or something?”

Villanelle looks over at her, grinning, and it’s as real and wide-open as a prairie sky. Being nigh-on constantly by her side for the past three months has not dimmed the power of it to cause something in Eve’s heart to twist up and then ease. “That’s a great idea,” she says, swinging their joined hands between them. “I’ve already got three.” (The first had been in Casablanca, with the same ring Eve is now sporting again, the second in Busan, where Villanelle used the opportunity to reveal to Eve that she had been secretly learning Korean, and now the third in Laval, Québec, the latest stop on their “Don’t Get Murdered By The Twelve” grand tour.) “Any interest in a sabbatical to Antarctica?”

“I don’t think they have champagne in Antarctica. It’s all research bases, right?”

“Eve, please. Even scientists like to party sometimes. I assume.”

“Probably not with Dom Perignon. I feel like their money is probably being spent on...like...”

Villanelle arches a brow. “No, please, tell me everything you know about the intricacies of Antarctic research and what tools it requires.”

Eve, tipsy and with a degree in criminal psychology (magna cum laude, but still useless) shoots her a Look. “I was going to say bear spray.”

And Villanelle laughs, loud and bright, and though it’s well into the night in Laval it feels like the sun is coming out.

They turn onto Rue Maurice-Gauvin, site of their home base of the past week. They have been staying in a mix of hotels, bed and breakfasts, and hostels, zigzagging across the globe with newly minted identity documents, never staying in one place more than eight days. At this point, anyone following them would be knocked flat with whiplash and jet lag.

The hotel is nice enough, though Eve wishes it was further into the summer so the use of the pool would be plausible. Mostly, she likes walking into the lobby and watching Villanelle light up before chatting with whoever’s at the desk in animated French. Eve wishes that she had even a fifth of the gift for languages that Villanelle does, so she could learn and speak with her in her favorite tongue. As it is, she’s been downloading Coffee Break French podcasts for long flights.

“Did you break the good news of our engagement?” Eve deadpans, when Villanelle has bid the desk attendant _au revoir_ and they are in the elevator ascending to the third floor.

“Mmh, no. Maybe I want to propose again at breakfast, and that would spoil it.”

“What the fuck? Nobody proposes with _breakfast.”_

“I don’t see why not. It can be a very romantic meal, you know. What nobody proposes with is lunch. Boring meal. Pointless.”

“Didn’t you literally live in Spain? The land of _la comida,_ where businesses close in the middle of the day for lunch?”

“I lived in _Barcelona._ It’s a tourist town, everything is open all the time.”

Eve has had enough, but luckily Villanelle has just unlocked the door to their suite with her keycard. It’s a matter of a firm hand at her hip to maneuver her around and press the back of her tailcoat against the door as it shuts behind them.

“Oh,” says Villanelle, impressed and pliable.

“You’re so annoying,” Eve responds, and kisses her hard.

Their first night together, which when Eve remembers it feels simultaneously like yesterday and a lifetime ago, they’d constantly stopped to marvel, to talk, to ask questions, for Villanelle to breathe through something akin to an anxiety attack. It had been nearly two hours before any clothes hit the carpet. Eve has never been a consumer of romance novels, but she had thought of about six purple-prose metaphors in the direct aftermath, something regarding waterfalls rushing over rocks, or a flint’s spark hitting tinder to grow into an inferno.

Now, things are more sure, and less poetic. Eve thinks clearer thoughts, like how there is a woman in her arms who she wishes was a lot less buttoned up, and how good the silk of the sheath dress Villanelle had bought her in Milan feels against her thighs as Villanelle’s fingers carefully maneuver under its hem. And how she can feel her pulse heavy and throbbing between her legs, the way she first had all those months ago, meeting Villanelle’s eyes on a lane in Bletcham.

Remembering that sends her spiraling, briefly, stunned at the magnitude of her choices. Her life had always felt so small, before. Going from the Ealing house to Vauxhall Cross to the bridge club and back again. Grocery shopping once a week, going on the occasional holiday to somewhere with a Lonely Planet guidebook. Always feeling like, just beyond her reach, there was something vast and terrifying and elating—until it wasn’t beyond her reach, and it was in front of her, tall and slim with honey hair and a full, laughing mouth.

Eve has been in fourteen countries in the last three months alone, logging hours on planes, trains, and one particularly horrible boat ride in a freak thunderstorm. She has been fake-proposed to in five-star restaurants, and has eaten sweet briouat on the side of a dusty thoroughfare. She has killed two people, and likely been marked for death by an international assassin ring. She is trying to learn French because it would make a woman smile.

“Where’d you go?” Villanelle whispers into the corner of her lips, lifting Eve out of her brief reverie.

She pushes Villanelle’s jacket from her shoulders and lets it pool on the floor. “I’m right here. Just thinking.”

Villanelle replaces her hand high on Eve’s leg, tracing figure eights with the pads of her fingers. “Come out of the past, _ja-gi._ We’re here now.” She is, as usual, obnoxiously prescient and terribly romantic. “And engaged to be married.” She is, also as usual, completely absurd.

Eve steps back from her and pulls her dress over her head, tossing it atop Villanelle’s jacket on the hardwood by the door. She relishes the way that Villanelle’s eyes, as if magnetized, rove over her body, from the pale blue cups of her bralette to the kitten heels she hasn’t kicked off yet. “I wanted to do that,” she says, petulant, and Eve laughs as she leaves her shoes by the door, a habit ingrained in her since she could stand.

“You know I’m not even technically divorced,” Eve says. She’s not sure when she started being able to joke about him. “You’re the other woman.”

Villanelle, who understands by now that this is a condition to cohabitating with Eve, toes out of her own ankle boots before advancing on her. Eve steps back twice, thrice, four times until she is at the edge of their borrowed bed. “Other woman, hm?” Villanelle says, with a hint of her old danger in the curve of her smile. “Sounds good to me.”

Some time later, with long interludes for searing kisses, Eve finally manages to undo the last tiny button on Villanelle’s blouse and rid her of it. Villanelle, because she is a fucking show-off, undoes Eve’s bralette one-handed and flings it away like it has personally offended her. At one point they take a break to make sure the door is locked and that the deadbolt is securely slid into place, so they can ignore the outside world for a while in favor of getting lost in each other. They take off earrings, leave the Casablanca ring on the bathroom counter, and then fall back into bed.

Eve has never had so many different iterations of sex, not even with the person she was married to for over a decade. Sometimes, Villanelle is rough with her. Those nights, she pulls at Eve's hair until she sighs. She pins her wrists down, stretches out over top of her, rakes her nails over Eve's shoulders. Other times, Villanelle is indescribably gentle, like she’s trying to write love letters inside of Eve with her fingertips. Tonight, she cedes control, something she has been getting marginally better at recently. Eve undresses her piece by piece, sets her lips at her neck, at the hollow of her throat, at each of her breasts. She lingers, as she often does, at the neat line of Villanelle’s most pronounced scar, the one that Eve had torn into her long ago in another country in another bed. Eve kisses it now, paying her respects to how much pain it took for them to get here. Then she slides up, lays parallel to Villanelle on the soft cotton sheets and watches something in her eyes unfurl when she slips two fingers inside her.

“I should fake-propose to you every night, if that’s what follows,” Villanelle says after, a pretty flush stained high on her cheeks. Her exhale is audible between the syllables. Eve, primly dipping her fingers into her mouth, rolls her eyes for probably the fortieth time that evening.

“It does seem to be the most efficient way to make you stop talking,” she says, as she reaches over to turn off the lamp on the bedside table, plunging the room into comfortable darkness. They’re still atop the duvet, facing each other as their eyes adjust. Villanelle cups Eve’s cheek, her breathing evening back out. “Besides," Eve continues, "it’s not like it’s any different than most nights. I don’t know where you coaxed this well of sexual stamina out from.”

Villanelle snorts. “I’m just that beautiful, I guess.” Eve flicks her in the side. Villanelle catches her wrist and pulls, using her grip to move closer so they are pressed together, chests, midriffs, hips, thighs. Eve feels like, given another inch of leeway, she could mold them together like clay, one body inextricable from the other. There’s some Greek story about this, she thinks, but before she can remember what it is, Villanelle’s kissing her, deep and slow. And Eve’s world narrows again, to a bed, to a woman, to the drag of her hand over each vertebra up and down her back.

x

Villanelle sometimes speaks Russian in her sleep. Eve hasn’t told her about this yet, because she’s afraid she’ll stop if she knows, clamping down on her subconscious as she has always been so good at doing. Inevitably, it wakes Eve when she does it; she has never been a very good sleeper to begin with. She drifts back into consciousness to the sound of Villanelle’s voice. _“Pozhaluysta,"_ she says this time, her brow furrowed and her hair flung across the hotel pillow. _"Nye ona."_ Outside the hotel room’s window, the sky is just beginning to lighten, the first strains of morning light coming through the gap in the curtains.

She mumbles something else that Eve can’t parse, and sighs, her forehead smoothing out, but at this point Eve feels rested enough and there doesn’t seem much point in going back to sleep when their alarm is going to go off in an hour anyway.

So she carefully extricates herself out from under Villanelle’s arm, detours to the bathroom, and dresses in a plain t-shirt and underwear. Their suite has a little kitchenette with an espresso machine, and Eve drops one of the multicolored capsules into its machinery. While it brews, she crosses to the desk and unplugs her phone, absently scrolling through the headlines. This is partially a creature comfort, a habit left over from her old life, and partially to keep abreast of anything that smacks of the Twelve or MI6 or anything that might, even indirectly, have to do with them. There’s not much this morning, though apparently a new baby panda was born at a Beijing zoo, which is always cause for celebration.

Eve takes her coffee and her phone and settles back into bed, propped up against the headboard with a couple of pillows at her back. She starts the complicated process of logging into her Fugitive Email, as she has decided to nickname it. Villanelle may have left the Twelve behind, but many of their tips and tricks are still useful, and she has taught Eve myriad things about keeping her electronics clean and as untraceable as possible. She doesn’t contact many people, but has been waiting for a response from an old college classmate who potentially has something that the two of them are very interested in.

The response, Eve realizes when she finally keys in the last numeric passcode, has come overnight.

_Eve—_

_First off, look at you!! Using TrashMail? You used to be so hopeless with tech stuff. Of course, the postscript of your message “Also, please don’t tell anybody I’ve contacted you” implies something fun and weird is going on, so maybe this is a “learned out of necessity” situation. Don’t worry, I’m destroying the email you sent me as soon as this response goes out. You’ve come to the right place with regard to online paranoia._

_In answer to your question, yeah, I’m still building gadgets. Very specific request you made, but actually I think I have something that you’ll like. It’s not quite done, but your interest in it has renewed mine, so I’m gonna fuck around with the app to get it functional. You should definitely pay me a visit—I’m attaching a Google Voice number you can call when you’re in NYC and we’ll link up. I don’t think they make Taboo anymore, but I can buy you and your ~mysterious companion~ (Seriously, who uses the word “companion” when referring to someone they’re traveling with? Are you the Doctor now?) something equally fruity and lethal, in honor of the old days. Class of ‘96 forever._

_With curiosity,_

_Demarius_

Pleased with the turn of events, Eve scribbles the attached number on a piece of hotel notepaper, then closes the email and opens a web browser, flicking through flight prices. It’s barely ninety minutes in the air, or six hours by car. There’s not much else she’s dying to do in Laval. They can leave this afternoon, unless Villanelle has any objections.

The alarm goes off, and Villanelle wakes up, and Eve briefly gets to see what might be her absolute favorite iteration of her—sleep-mussed and still unclothed, stretching out her limbs. “Morning,” she says, voice thick and low. “You’re up.”

“Mhm.” Eve kisses her tangled hair. “Demarius responded. Next stop, Manhattan.”

Villanelle makes a tiny interested noise, rolling out of bed and going to the chest of drawers to extract a pair of leggings and a sports bra. She is religious about running in the mornings, saying that it clears her head and wakes up her body. The thirty minutes a day when she is out running, never with earphones, is about the only time they spend apart. “You want to fly or drive?”

“I was gonna ask you that.”

She pulls on the athletic clothes, then goes to the door where their clothes from the night before are still crumpled. “You really have no respect for silk,” she chastises Eve, shaking out the sheath dress and draping it over the room’s armchair. “And let’s fly, the Montreal airport isn’t far. Book the flight while I’m gone and I’ll take care of a hotel.”

“Don’t get caught,” Eve calls after her as she heads for the door of the room, ties on her running shoes, and scrapes her hair back into a ponytail.

“Ha, ha. You either.” Villanelle blows her a kiss, and then she is gone. A minute later, Eve peeks out the window to watch her exit the front door of the building, breaking into a jog and quickly picking up her pace. Her lean shoulders are exposed to the weak sunlight of the morning, and the sight of her always guilts Eve into a quick workout of her own on the floor of the room, fifteen minutes of power yoga and some crunches. She will never be anywhere close to as fit as Villanelle is, but from the stories Villanelle has told her about the Twelve’s training process, she is absolutely fine with that.

After, Eve showers and books their flight out for two in the afternoon on Villanelle’s laptop while wrapped in a white hotel towel, finishing her now-tepid cup of coffee just as Villanelle returns with sweat sticking hair to her forehead. “Sexy,” she comments at Eve’s towel couture, and Eve throws a mockery of a come-hither look over her bare shoulder.

It has honestly astonished her that the two of them, who have spent so much time antagonizing each other, have fallen into a successful routine. Eve (who has a lot of spare time to think about these things) hypothesizes that it’s working for a few reasons. First, there’s nothing quite like being moving targets to bind two people together, and Eve has _always_ felt a certain sense of protectiveness over Villanelle. So the ways she steps out of line, the arguments they have, ultimately all feel small in the face of the grander mission: keeping Villanelle safe, and keeping herself safe by extension. She knows that Villanelle feels the same protectiveness over her, which is a sweet spot to be in given her objectively more refined relevant skill set in these matters.

Second, of course, she’s absurdly, stupidly in love with her. Eve had tried to avoid thinking of it in those terms for a long time, despite being aware of the physical attraction and the intense fascination. She has often thought about when it shifted, when something new melted inside her and magnetized toward Villanelle (even as her mind refused to acknowledge what was happening). The answer changes with the day—today, as Eve listens to Villanelle sing something in lilting French in the shower, she thinks it was standing in the Shoreditch flat watching her flick through an Introduction to Philosophy paperback.

Love _from_ Villanelle feels a lot like respect, which is a welcome far cry from her old possessiveness. She listens when Eve speaks, drinks in her words and files them away. (Her memory is staggering. She remembers the exact type of olives that Eve prefers, the month and year she started working for MI5, and that folding laundry is her least favorite housework.) It also feels like vulnerability. Eve knows, with a heady sense of pride and responsibility, that she is the only one Villanelle will let ask questions about the most painful parts of her life, and certainly the only one who receives honest answers.

The subject of Eve’s thoughts emerges from the bathroom in a towel of her own, pouting, and complains that Eve has left her engagement ring on the sink where it could easily fall down the drain or into the toilet. She does all of this in an exaggerated New York accent, which has gotten a _lot_ better since they watched Birds of Prey twice on two consecutive nights. Sometimes, love from Villanelle feels like complete silliness.

Once they are dressed, they go down to breakfast in the tucked-away nook in the hotel’s lobby. The food’s not fabulous, but it’s hot and there’s a variety of it and, best of all, a machine that squeezes orange juice fresh, which Villanelle has taken daily advantage of. Villanelle books their next place, an AirBnB in the West Village, while reclining in her chair and running her sandaled foot up Eve’s calf. They people-watch and swap theories, one of their favorite ways to pass the dull hours and also a way to make constantly scanning their surroundings a little bit more fun.

“That woman’s visiting a rich long-lost uncle right before he dies hoping to get written into the will,” Eve says, indicating a dark-haired lady eating a single slice of buttered toast by herself.

Villanelle looks over her shoulder to catch a casual glimpse of her, and nods thoughtfully as she turns back around. “She’s got four cats to feed, and works in publishing.”

“The last book she helped work on was a total flop and now she’s thinking about trying stand-up comedy, but it’s _not_ a good move for her.”

“All her jokes are about the cats. She—”

 _“Félicitations!”_ comes a sudden exclamation from next to their table, and they both look, surprised, at one of the desk attendants Villanelle has been conversing with. He’s the oldest of the staff that they’ve seen, with spots around his jawline and nice eyes, and he is standing nearby with a broad smile.

Villanelle, confused yet dignified, smiles one of her blank character smiles. _“Pour quoi?”_

The man goes off in a volley of French that Eve cannot follow, but she is immediately aware of the slight flash of panic in Villanelle’s eyes, the way her smile freezes as she sets down her juice glass. “ _En anglais, s'il vous plaît, pour Mademoiselle Kim,”_ she says, tone mild and pleasant despite the fact that something is clearly wrong.

“My apologies,” the man says, switching to English, and he is so excited his cheeks are reddened. “I just wanted to wish you congratulations. I said when I saw the video, I know those women, I talked to them just yesterday in the lobby! But only, Mademoiselle Comtois, you should have said you were planning it, we would have arranged for flowers.”

Eve’s stomach is in her feet. “The video?”

“On Twitter! You know, I wasn’t into it at first, but the grandchildren taught me how and honestly I love it.”

Villanelle’s mouth is taut, her eyes illegible. “Could you show us?”

“Of...of course.” The man’s smile falters a bit, but he pulls his phone out of his pocket, opening the app in question and scrolling back. “I assumed it was one of you who posted it....?”

Then he is turning the phone around to show a cell phone video, taken from across the restaurant, of Villanelle kneeling in front of Eve, ring box open. Of her taking Eve’s hand, of Eve flushing and eventually nodding, and of the surrounding tables applauding as Villanelle pulls her up and kisses her with one hand on either side of her jaw. It’s not the best quality, but it is unquestionably them, and it is titled “OMG!! Adorable Lesbian Proposal”, and holy Jesus fucking Christ. 

“We did not post that,” Villanelle says, her tone miraculously neutral.

“Oh,” says the desk attendant, taking his phone back. “Well! It was posted last night, and already has nine thousand retweets. You have, it seems...what is the phrase you young people use? Gone viral.”

They make brief, stunned eye contact. “Well, that is certainly a surprise!” responds Villanelle with a sunny false laugh.

“My congratulations again. Allow me to send some champagne to your room later?”

“We actually were called back unexpectedly,” Eve says, hanging on desperately to Villanelle’s coolness and trying to imitate her unaffected tone. “We’ll be checking out this morning after we eat.”

“Some chocolates for the road, then.” The desk attendant taps his own chest, resolute. “I will go myself! I will be back in twenty minutes, and they will be waiting. My congratulations again, and wishing you many happy years together.”

“Fuck,” Eve says as he leaves with a spring in his step, anger starting to flicker in her chest.

“Fuck,” Villanelle agrees, ashen, and pushes her orange juice away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i. truly haven't written anything but oneshots since the year of our lord 2010 so any feedback/criticism is genuinely appreciated!!!  
> ii. i'm villanellogy on tumblr if you'd prefer to talk/say hi over there  
> iii. thinking i'm going to update this weekly or a little more frequently! we'll see where the current takes us


	2. WEST VILLAGE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **West Village: Regarding Lovers' Spats, Airport Novels, Emotional Intelligence, Runaway Logistics, Garlic Naan, and Oksana Polastri**

“Do you want water, for the plane?”

Eve shakes her head. Villanelle, skittish and cowed, gets up from her seat at the airport gate, plucking out a few bills from the stack of cash they have just withdrawn from an ATM, the maximum allowed for each of their cards. The bank cards and passports will have to go as soon as they hit New York, and it will take Villanelle some time to work out connecting one of her stashes to a new set. She makes to walk away, toward the newsstand store they had passed on their way through the terminal.

“Wait.” This is the first thing Eve has said to her since getting up from the breakfast table. She stands, shoulders her bag and pulls up the handle on her suitcase. “I’ll walk with you.” As angry as Eve is with her, separating when they have just undone the past three months of confused trail-weaving does not seem like a good idea.

Villanelle purses her lips, breathes out, and nods, clearly relieved. She had tried to initiate conversation while they were quickly packing their things, and again in the taxi on the way to the airport, then once more when they passed through security, each attempt met with stony silence. They gather their bags and head back the way they came.

Eve is afraid that she’ll start saying things she regrets if she speaks. The silence has allowed her to move within her mind from _How fucking dare she put us in danger like that_ to _Okay, Eve, it’s not like you did anything to stop it from happening_. She’s upset that Villanelle’s theatrics have, however unintentionally, resulted in what is basically a trail of fresh breadcrumbs for the Twelve. On top of it, though, she’s upset at herself for going along with it, for not taking a look around the restaurant to see if anyone was filming. If they’d seen it, they could have stolen the phone, or played coy and convinced its owner to delete the video, or even roughed them up behind the restaurant. But they had not seen it, so she had done none of those things, and neither had Villanelle, and now things are tense the same way they were the first few weeks after their early-morning flight from London.

If she opens her mouth, though, she’s sure something bitter and harsh is going to emanate that she doesn’t actually mean, and Villanelle might spiral when both of them need to be sharp. Accountability is a bitch that she’s working on. And Villanelle is more than aware that she’s fucked up (that is abundantly clear in the meekness of her expression and the slump in her shoulders), so she doesn’t need to actively hear it from Eve as well.

Eve peruses the rack of cheap paperbacks by the entrance of the store while Villanelle selects and pays for a bottle of sparkling water. One of the innumerable James Patterson (read: ghostwritten, possibly by AI at this point) novels actually manages to catch Eve’s eye, so she picks it up from the shelf and goes to the kiosk. “Give me a twenty,” she says to Villanelle, no teeth in her voice, and trades it for the book and some change, eschewing a bag in favor of tucking it in her purse.

By the time they make their way back to the gate, boarding has started. They are toward the middle in the process (no Frequent Flyer miles or business class while on the run), but stand around waiting by the line so they can get into it quickly when their group number is called. Once they are actually _on_ the plane, some of Eve’s anxiety ebbs away. No chance of any traditional weapons making their way on board, and the strict rituals of flight are oddly comforting. Her mind is whirring, prioritizing what they will have to do when they touch down— _taxi, call Demarius from a burner, get rid of Clara and Élodie, figure out new documents._ They will need to lay low, no trips to the Statue of Liberty, not that Eve really had an interest in going there anyway.

The flight boards, the safety announcement plays, the plane rolls out onto the runway. Villanelle has out her Korean-English dictionary, muttering words to herself with her head bent forward so her hair obscures her profile. Eve settles against the window and absently flicks through the first pages of the novel, which is predictably dreadful but a good distraction. As soon as the plane levels out and it’s allowed, Eve lowers the tray and props her book on it. She reflexively checks the pocket of her jacket to ensure Demarius’s phone number is still there, folded up tight on its hotel stationary.

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Villanelle rummaging in her backpack, but does not inquire. A minute later, a hand haltingly sneaks over to her side of the row. Villanelle sets two beautifully wrapped chocolate truffles from the box given to them by the overeager desk attendant on Eve’s tray, in front of her book. They’re the orange ones, Villanelle’s favorite, and Eve knows what it means even before Villanelle says “I’m sorry.”

Eve looks at her, and nods. “I know,” she responds, and sets a hand on Villanelle’s knee. She leans into the touch immediately, solemn gratitude suffusing her lovely face. “I’m still upset, but I was stupid too. We got a little complacent, I think.” Villanelle nods ruefully, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. “But we’ll figure it out. Nothing we haven’t done before. Just means you probably won’t get to do much cavorting around the Madison Avenue boutiques.”

Villanelle makes an odd sound that Eve can’t distinguish between a laugh and a sob, and when she looks over at her it turns out it’s both. “Sorry,” she mumbles again, swiping at her brimming eyes.

“I’m not gonna leave you over a damn Twitter video,” Eve says, half-exasperated, but she knows that at least subconsciously that’s where Villanelle’s emotions are coming from. Her focus may have been on _criminal_ psychology, but she picked up enough about trauma along the way, which Villanelle has in spades. It doesn’t exonerate her—Eve thinks the _exoneration_ ship has sailed, without either of them on it. But it does offer some insight. This time, when Villanelle laughs, it’s a shade calmer.

They settle back into silence for the short flight, though it’s more comfortable now. Villanelle is writing out Korean words with a ballpoint pen on a notepad she lifted a few weeks ago from a hotel in Valparaíso. Eve unwraps and eats one of the truffles, slips the other one in the pocket of her jacket for later, and goes back to her book. At the very least, this fiasco resulted in some excellent Belgian chocolate.

x

Once on the ground at JFK, they move as quickly as possible, collecting their bags, trading out the Canadian dollars for American ones at an exchange window, and hurtling themselves into a taxi toward Manhattan. Eve greets the driver and then firmly shuts the glass divider.

Villanelle is on her phone as soon as they are settled in the back of the yellow cab, speaking in smooth, professional Dutch to the executor of one of her stash accounts. Eve is grateful that she has a head for numbers and finances, because Eve herself does not. As it is, Villanelle had once told her an estimated sum of money that she has scattered around the globe, and Eve is still not exactly sure how to conceive of such a number. “Smart investing,” Villanelle had shrugged when asked. After this conversation, Eve stopped complaining about Villanelle’s penchant for buying her clothes, as it clearly wasn’t going to be at the sacrifice of their ability to eat.

They have just crossed over the bridge by the time Villanelle hangs up, and Eve quirks an inquiring eyebrow in her direction. “Wired a not-insignificant sum to myself, well, Élodie that is, to a Western Union not far from where we’re staying. Her last action. Don’t use anything of yours, it’s...more compromised.” Meaning, of course, that it’s the one Villanelle said out loud in the video.

“Should we turn over phones, too?”

Villanelle considers. “It’s never a bad idea, but I don’t know that it needs to be our top priority. You should be fine to call your friend from yours as long as you’ve been taking the precautions I taught you.”

“Of course I have.” Eve takes out the phone in question and the piece of paper she’d scribbled the number on, and dials while the driver wends his way through lower Manhattan. Eve hasn’t been here in years, and she knows Villanelle’s only experience with the city had been a job for the Twelve four years ago. It had been one of the kills in Eve’s old file, even before she knew that Villanelle existed—a lawyer at one of the city’s top firms for corporate litigation, throat slit at his desk one night while he was working late, all the security cameras mysteriously blacked out for six minutes. She can still recite the details of the case from memory.

Demarius picks up on the third ring, his deep baritone exactly as Eve remembers it even down the phone line. “Hello?”

“Is this who I call to join Professor Levkovitz’s Forensic Psychology study group?” Eve says, unable to help a smile. Villanelle raises her eyebrows.

“Eve!” comes the response, coupled with Demarius’s laughter. “Wow, that was fast. Are you in the city?”

“Just touched down. We were in Quebec, so it took like five minutes to fly.”

“And who is _we_ again? Are you with that, oh, what was his name, you brought him to the twenty-year reunion...”

“Niko, and no, I’m not. I’ll explain as much as I can in person. When can we come see you? We’ve got some things to take care of tonight, but anytime tomorrow. Is there a chance in hell you can get them functioning by then?”

Demarius pauses, and Eve hears papers rustling around in the background. “Mm...we can do lunch. No earlier, if I’m going to stay up all night coding. Not to undercut the fact that I’m excited to see your weird self again, but is this, like, a pro bono project, or...?”

“Money’s not an issue,” Eve responds. “Just add up how much the equipment costs and whatever freelance rate you think is fair on top. If it’s less than...five thousand?” She looks over at Villanelle, who considers the figure and then nods. “Then we can pay in cash.”

A low whistle on the other end of the phone. “Now you’ve _really_ piqued my interest. Meet me by the 145th 1 station, I know a ramen place with cocktails to die for. Let’s say twelve-thirty. Where are you staying?”

“Downtown. We can get to the 1, no worries.” Eve tentatively trusts Demarius, but it’s still probably inadvisable to give someone she hasn’t seen in person since her twenty-year class reunion her exact address. “Hey, completely unrelated question: is there a way to get a video scrubbed from Twitter?”

“Uh, how popular has it been?”

Eve grimaces. “Had six thousand retweets this morning. Posted probably late last night.”

“Woof. Theoretically yes, but balance of probability is that people have probably downloaded it by now and cross-posted to other social media sites. There are services for that kind of thing, but they’re spendy and they don’t always work. Internet people don’t like being told to take shit down. What, did a karaoke video surface? I remember you used to _love_ doing Disney at wine nights...”

“Something like that. Thanks anyway. We’ll be there at twelve-thirty tomorrow. You’re a godsend, Demarius.”

“I know, right? I’ll be debugging these little fuckers but call if anything changes.” He exhales audibly. “God, I love a challenge. See you tomorrow.”

Eve sets down the phone just as the driver slows to a stop, idling at the curb and reaching back to knock on the glass to indicate they’ve arrived. Villanelle opens the glass window and pays in cash, and they get out with all their things. Villanelle leads the way, and goes straight for a lockbox on the railing of a nondescript building. Eve reflexively scans the area while she inputs the combination, registering a security camera on the outside of a deli on the corner, though it’s pointed away from the door. Nobody’s paying them any mind.

“Got it,” Villanelle says, holding up a set of keys from the lockbox. “Anything weird?”

“Not that I can see.”

The apartment is a walk-up, and Eve declines Villanelle’s offer to bring both of their suitcases up three floors, electing to suffer in self-sufficient silence instead. When her breathing returns to normal, she can actually take in the place; it’s small, but modern, with ever-desirable exposed brick in the living room and a cramped but updated kitchen. They do their usual arrival routine, Eve shutting all the curtains and blinds while Villanelle sweeps for bugs, cameras, or anything else suspicious.

“We probably shouldn’t actually unpack in case we need to leave in a hurry,” Eve posits. This is a luxury they have recently begun allowing themselves.

Villanelle nods while lifting a picture frame containing a print of a calla lily from the wall. “Hang up that dress, though. It’ll be as good as ruined if it stays in the bottom of your suitcase.”

Eve does so, though not without a slight flare of annoyance. “What first?” she asks when she emerges from the neat bedroom to find Villanelle intensely inspecting a bronze statuette.

“The money. Then finding a place to get documents. I’m sure there are places around the city; I can look on some of the more unsavory websites. Maybe your Demarius can recommend someone if I can’t find it tonight. We should get some groceries, and some weapons.” 

The whole thing has Eve’s head hurting, and she shakes a couple paracetamols out of a bottle she keeps in her shoulder bag, swallowing them with the last of Villanelle’s sparkling water from the plane. “Fine. Western Union, grocery store, somewhere that sells knives, then back here for research. I’ll do what I can about the video, report it to get the original post deleted, maybe look into some of those services Demarius mentioned. It’s probably too late, but it feels a little stupid to not at least try.”

Villanelle, watching Eve toss back the pills, crosses to her with worry creasing her brow. “Are you okay?” she asks, with a gentle hand cupping the back of Eve’s neck. Eve considers moving away, shrugging off her touch, then thinks better of it; it would be out of callousness and not discomfort, seeing as even while she has this internal debate her body naturally angles toward Villanelle’s. _God,_ trying to be emotionally intelligent is exhausting.

“Just feels like this day has been three days long, and I know tomorrow will probably be even worse while we run around trying to get passports. If it’s anything like the first round, that is.” They’d lingered in Belarus for more days than Eve had felt comfortable while Villanelle negotiated fiercely with a member of an organized crime family with a reputation for severing thumbs with cigar clippers.

“I will take care of it.” Villanelle’s eyes turn resolute, her jaw setting. Eve is distinctly reminded of a documentary she saw years ago where a grey wolf ripped out a rival’s throat and left crimson scattered across the snow, after the rival injured his mate. The look on her face sends a shiver down Eve’s spine, and it’s not a fearful one. “Okay? I got us into this mess, I’ll get us out of it, or whatever that phrase is. I’ll make it up to you.”

Eve meets her gaze and reaches up a hand to dislodge Villanelle’s, still at the nape of her neck, pressing her lips to the center of her palm. “What, the orange chocolates weren’t your entire apology?”

The fiery expression cracks a little, whether from the kiss or the comment, and Villanelle huffs out a laugh.

x

“I’ve decided Twitter is the worst website ever invented,” Eve declares, throwing her phone unceremoniously onto the couch, where it bounces and hits a concentrating Villanelle in the thigh. “I reported it and did all the support stuff, but I don’t think it’s going to do any good. And it’s up to twenty-two thousand retweets now.” She had even made an account and figured out how to message the person who posted it originally asking them to take it down, but given that her profile was a blank avatar with no posts, _obviously_ they didn’t believe that it was actually her from the video, and had blocked her straight away. Eve deletes the account. She has soured on Twitter, not that she ever felt particularly positively about it to begin with. 

Villanelle, who has clearly only been half-listening while she taps away at her laptop, finally looks up. “Objectively, we are a very beautiful couple. Not that this doesn’t suck, but I don’t blame people for wanting to look at us.” She reaches out a hand, making a grasping motion in the air. Despite herself, Eve laughs, and passes over the takeaway box of now-tepid garlic naan from a nearby Indian restaurant. It’s nearing midnight. “Did you put the rest of the cash in the—”

“Lining of your backpack, yeah, it’s all there. Just have to make sure to keep it and my bag with us.”

“I’m not the one with a habit of leaving her purses on bridges.”

Eve scoffs. “That was _one_ time, and excuse me for being a little distracted, what with your dramatic piece of let’s-walk-away theater.”

As she takes a truly heroic bite of naan, Villanelle momentarily sets her laptop on the couch cushion next to her. From her nearby armchair, Eve watches her stretch, having been sitting in the same position for hours. When she is focused, it is truly something to behold. “We should go to sleep soon,” Eve says to her, seeing the tiredness in her face that she knows she won’t admit to. “Make sure we’re sharp for tomorrow.”

As if she’s been waiting for permission, Villanelle snaps the computer shut and hands Eve’s phone back. She gets up and goes to the bathroom, no doubt to complete her nightly iteration of a simple but expensive skincare routine. Some of her dewy complexion comes from youth, yes, but Eve had felt a certain kind of relief when she first realized that Villanelle does _some_ work for her beauty. Eve changes into comfortable shorts and a t-shirt, and they swap places so she can wash her own face and brush her teeth.

When she emerges, Villanelle is already in bed, the lights off except for a lamp on the bedside table. Eve plugs her phone in, slips the switchblade she bought earlier in the afternoon under her pillow, and joins her. The energy between them is still a little off, and while Villanelle lays close, she carefully keeps her distance, not reaching out.

“Who do you want me to be tomorrow? For your friend,” she asks, as Eve turns onto her side so they’re face-to-face. Something Eve can’t quite puzzle out is in her eyes.

“I mean, the Twelve certainly already know we’re traveling together, I don’t see why you would have to put on a charact—”

“No, Eve.” Villanelle cuts her off. “I’m not asking as Villanelle who’s traveling with you, I’m asking as Villanelle who shares a bed with you. We don’t...it’s not as if I go around meeting all your old school friends.”

She has a point. Given that they are frequently renting single-bed rooms and moving as one nigh-on constantly, they have been rather _visibly_ together to the innumerable strangers whose paths they have crossed the past few months. But all of those people have been just that: strangers. Eve considers; with the events of the afternoon, she hasn’t had time to give much thought to what she’s planning on telling Demarius. In one regard, it might be easier not to have to explain their relationship, especially since the last time she saw Demarius in person, it was with Niko on her arm. However...

“You’re with me,” Eve decides, studying Villanelle’s face as she says it. “This is my life now, I’m not going to sit there with him and pretend I’ve still got a husband and a chicken waiting back in London. Especially not with what we’re asking him to give us. We’ll have to get our story straight for him tomorrow, I’m thinking we say something generically spy-related, but if you’re asking if I want to hide that we’re together, then the answer is no. Besides,” she can’t help but add, drily, “anyone who’s ever met us has been able to tell what’s going on.”

Villanelle’s mouth quirks in a soft smile, and Eve can tell that she’s pleased, though trying to conceal it. “True,” she agrees. “We’re not very subtle, historically speaking.”

“Subtle is not the word I would use to describe myself waxing poetic about your eyes to a forensic sketch artist, no.”

“Nor the word I would use to describe myself being pulled into a psych eval because I drew your hair on a slip of paper.”

“God,” Eve groans, “I keep forgetting you told me that. Did you also doodle V+E on your notebooks? Practice signing your name _Oksana Polastri?_ Bonus points if there was a little heart over the _i._ ”

“Shut up,” Villanelle mumbles, though she’s grinning. She reaches over to turn off the lamp, and as they lay together in the dark, Eve hears her voice again, soft and slightly unsure of the space between them. “Can I kiss you? Just that. We’ll go back to having mindblowing sex once I pay penance for being stupid.”

A mix of amusement and adoration washes over Eve, and in answer, she leans forward and finds Villanelle’s lips, a hand steady at her jaw. “It’s not purgatory,” she says, when she pulls back. “And you don’t get out of spooning me just because I’m kind of pissed at you.” And Eve turns over, dragging Villanelle’s arm over her waist.

“Good night,” Villanelle whispers, her nose pressed into Eve’s hair.

“Good night,” Eve whispers in return. Between the ex-assassin at her back and the knife under her pillow, she feels, against all odds, remarkably safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i. YES i know laval is not as cool as montreal. it was a choice that i made for chapter 1 that i now realize...i did not execute as smoothly as i wanted to. i pinky swear every other location i'll write in this fic will be somewhere where i have actually spent significant time instead of just lurking on google streetview, to avoid committing similar geography crimes. 
> 
> ii. villanellogy on tumblr for your Thots™ and Feelings© should you have them
> 
> iii. again, i haven't written a multi-chapter in a lot of years, so truly any criticism is welcome & will be taken into account as i continue writing! 
> 
> iv. you're beautiful and i hope you're having a great day


	3. HARLEM

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Harlem: Concerning Benjamin Button, Graduation Photos, Ramen, DIY Piercings, and Penance**

Twelve-thirty the next day finds them ascending out of the subway station after a brief battle with a metrocard machine and an uneventful uptown ride, mostly consisting of the two of them listing all the public transit systems that are better kept and operated than the New York City one. As they emerge into the Harlem sunshine, Eve swivels her head, looking around for—

“Eve!” comes a jovial shout, and there’s Demarius on the other side of the block, waving frantically. He has the same Coke-bottle glasses and stubble as he did four years ago, though there’s a bit more grey in his hair. Eve’s grinning immediately, picking up her pace to meet him on the corner with Villanelle trailing behind. He wraps her in a bear hug, her head barely coming up to his shoulder. Though Eve doesn’t have an ounce of regret about choosing this path with Villanelle, good _Lord_ is it nice to see a familiar face after weeks upon weeks of traveling.

_“You_ look fucking fantastic,” Demarius says, holding Eve at arm’s length and examining her. This is, Eve is sure, partially to do with the fact that her outfit is a piece of Villanelle craftsmanship (consisting of trim-cut dark jeans and a flattering rust-red blouse, paired with black chukka boots). “I swear you _de-aged_ since I last saw you. Is your newfound interest in tech related to, like, a Benjamin Button situation?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly it.” Eve notices Villanelle, standing aside watching the interaction with her hands in the pockets of her bomber jacket, amused but awkward. “My girlfriend here is secretly ninety, but she doesn’t look it.” Demarius’s thick eyebrows shoot halfway up his forehead as Villanelle, grinning and throwing a _Really?_ look in Eve’s direction, steps closer and extends a hand.

“I remember Winston Churchill’s election like it was yesterday,” she says, as Demarius shakes her proffered hand. “Good to meet you. Villanelle.” They’d discussed her going by a different name, but as Eve pointed out, Demarius already knows who _she_ is, and if he were to turn around and tell someone relevant that Eve Polastri is traveling with a young woman, any idiot would be able to fill in the gap.

“We _do_ have a lot to catch up on,” Demarius says to Eve, as the three of them set off down the sidewalk together. He leads them to an unassuming storefront which turns out to be a tiny, funky little restaurant with a well-stocked bar and swing music playing over the speakers. “Forgive me, as I woke up about thirteen minutes ago, but I could have sworn you said _girlfriend?”_

Eve isn’t sure whether she’s more amused by his shock (he did, after all, witness all the tragic men she fucked in college) or Villanelle’s barely-hidden glee at being referred to in such terms. “I’m full of surprises, what can I say? I’ll explain some of them over one of these to-die-for cocktails you promised me.”

As if on cue, the host ushers them to a cramped table in the corner, menus already set on the table. Villanelle takes off her backpack but keeps it securely between her calves under the table; Eve does the same with her bag. Once they are settled and plied with a complicated-sounding cocktail each (Villanelle’s involves a handheld wood smoker, somehow), it’s Villanelle who speaks first.

“How did you meet Eve?” she asks. It’s a good tactic to get him thinking about something other than the two thousand questions he wants to ask, though Eve knows that she has probably brought it up more out of actual curiosity than for strategy’s sake. She realizes, about one second too late, that she has essentially orchestrated a buffet of embarrassing stories that Villanelle will no doubt tease her about until the day one of them dies.

_“Well,”_ Demarius says, adjusting his thick glasses and grinning over at Eve. “I was in this second-year computer science class, and it must have been, what, 1993? Wait, were you even _alive_ in 1993?”

“Which month?”

Eve takes a generous sip of her drink, and considers stabbing herself in the leg with the switchblade in her pocket.

To his credit, Demarius doesn’t _comment,_ just shoots Eve an absolutely shit-eating look before continuing. “Anyway, in walks this one...” He gestures to Eve. “Totally lost. The professor asked her a question and she looked like a deer in the headlights.”

Eve jumps to her own defense. “I’m shit at math, and I heard you could get out of the requirement by taking computer science, which _sounded_ easier at the time. And by the time I transferred, the only class open was the 200-level, so it was a recipe for disaster, really.”

Demarius laughs, remembering. “I took pity on her. She was the new kid on the block, plus we were the only two non-white people in the class so we legally had to stick together. I single-handedly saved her ass on the exams and most of the assignments and figured out that she _was_ smart as hell, just not...in that particular regard.”

“You are intentionally leaving out the parts where I saved _your_ ass when it came to your psychology papers,” Eve interjects. “It was a mutually beneficial relationship. His research skills _sucked._ And it wasn’t all academic, we figured out we lived on the same hall and organized a lot of group bonding events.”

“Which was code, of course, for drinking terrible alcohol and listening to terrible music and watching terrible movies.”

Villanelle is looking between them, her eyes sparkling with amusement. During their frequent late-night talks, the two of them endlessly studying each other, Eve has gone over the bare bones of this time period but not into much detail. Eve can practically see her filing every word away in her nigh-on photographic memory. “Sounds like fun,” she says. “And you graduated together?”

“Ah,” Demarius says, and shifts to pull a 4x6 photograph out of his back pocket. Eve barely has time to say _“no fucking way”_ before he’s sliding it across the table. “I dug this out last night after Eve called, I thought it would be funny.” Eve tries to snatch it, but Villanelle’s reflexes are quicker, and she picks it up by a corner and holds it just out of arm’s reach. She makes a sound that might best be described as crowing with delight.

The photo in question is one of Demarius and Eve, ages twenty-two and twenty-one respectively, in their caps and gowns, standing in front of the student center with their arms around each other. Eve’s hair has always looked about the same, but this photo is an unfortunate documentation of her years of plucking her brows paper-thin, giving her a permanently surprised look. Villanelle is looking at the picture like she’s been handed a slip of paper with the meaning of life written on it.

“Look at you,” she marvels, holding the photo up next to Eve’s face to compare. Eve takes the opportunity to swipe it, shaking her head at Demarius who appears about three guffaws away from falling out of his chair.

“At least Eve aged gracefully, unlike yours truly,” he says, once his laughter has subsided. A server sidles up by the table, and they pause the trip down memory lane long enough to order. After, Demarius turns back to Villanelle. “And how did _you_ meet Eve? Because, and don’t take this the wrong way, I _definitely_ didn’t see this coming.”

Villanelle grins, turning up her charm. “We met in a bathroom. Which, speaking of, I’m going to go use. I’ll let Eve explain, if she doesn’t mind.” _This_ is tactical—they’d agreed over bagels that morning that Eve should be the one to navigate the bulk of their story, reducing the probability of any inconsistencies with Eve’s actual life story that Demarius is familiar with. Villanelle gets up from her seat, taking her backpack with her, and trails her index finger over Eve’s shoulders as she passes behind her chair to wend her way to the restaurant’s bathroom.

Demarius leans forward on his elbows. “So. Please. I feel like I need some popcorn to accompany the story of how you ended up traveling with and apparently _dating_ a Russian supermodel in her late twenties?”

Eve groans good-naturedly. “Long story short, I worked for British intelligence, and I got mixed up in some stuff I shouldn’t have. She was a translator I was working with, she speaks like twenty languages.” Definitely less likely to make Demarius run out of the restaurant than confessing Villanelle’s past as a contract killer. It feels a little shitty to lie to him, but Eve rationalizes that it’s for his own protection. “We got together. I’ve been on the move for a while, and she came with me. She’s...” Eve deliberates on a way to say this that doesn’t sound _completely_ cliché and ridiculous. “I’ve never been with anyone who understands me like she does.”

Clutching his chest in a mock-swoon, Demarius looks like the cat who got the canary. “So all those awful men you hooked up when we were in school together were...you being a closet case?”

“No.” Eve leans back in her seat, stealing a sip from Villanelle’s drink in her absence. “It’s not like that. Really, I never even considered being with a woman before her. So you can rest assured that I just had really awful taste in men. Actually, with the glaring exception of Niko, I have had pretty much unilaterally awful taste in men.”

“Niko was the one I met. You were married, yeah?”

“Yeah. But I sort of...got him embroiled in the stuff I got mixed up in. And then she came along.”

Demarius lets out a low whistle, and takes a long swig of his drink. “Wow. Been an eventful couple of years for you, huh?”

Eve laughs wryly. “Yeah, you can say that again. Anyway. Without going into too much detail and embroiling _you,_ I would say that we are in a not-insignificant amount of danger, and we’ve had to find each other a couple of times already. Hence my ask to you.”

“This is all some spy shit,” Demarius says, impressed, which is exactly the impression Eve hoped that he would have. Villanelle returns from the bathroom and settles back in her chair, touching Eve’s knee lightly under the table as she replaces her backpack on the floor between her feet. “Do you _actually_ speak twenty languages, Villanelle?”

She smiles serenely and swirls her drink in her glass. “Eve is exaggerating. It’s thirteen, if you count the ones I’m learning.”

Their food arrives, whereupon Eve has perhaps the best ramen she’s ever tasted in her life, handmade noodles in impossibly rich broth, brimming with toppings. Villanelle appears to feel similarly, attacking her bowl with all the grace of a bull in a china shop. “Good, right?” Demarius says, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Just ‘cause you’re in town for scary spy reasons doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a couple of good meals.”

“This guy gets it,” says Villanelle, her mouth full of king oyster mushroom. Eve neatly plucks a sprout out of Villanelle’s bowl with her chopsticks, to which Villanelle responds with her finest _You’re-lucky-I-love-you_ expression, then turns back to Demarius. “Do you have more embarrassing Eve stories? Photos? I’ll take anything.”

Demarius considers. “She used to do this thing where she would lure some dumbass frat boy into conversation at parties, and then demolish him by clearly knowing way more about the given topic. All of this after four or five wine coolers, and usually wearing butterfly hair clips.”

“Friends don’t remind friends about butterfly hair clips,” Eve mutters. Villanelle’s expression is not unlike a child on Christmas morning. “Do you have the trackers with you?”

“How dare you change the subject to something relevant to our visit,” Villanelle teases, to Demarius’s amusement as he pulls a small case out of the pocket of his jacket. He sets it on the table and opens it with the hand not holding his chopsticks, revealing two tiny round silver devices, affixed onto locking earring backs.

“Cool,” breathes Villanelle, picking one up between her index finger and thumb.

“Professional,” Eve chides her, unable to help an old joke, and is rewarded with a snort of laughter. Still, she picks up the other one and inspects it.

Sipping broth noisily from his spoon, Demarius watches them inspect his handiwork. “I had the hardware already, so it was just making them into fashion pieces that had to be done on that front. They’re cool as shit, they use the same tech as that Matrix PowerWatch that came out last year. Waterproof, uses body heat to charge. It was coding the app to actually see the location that gave me a headache, but I got it working at about three in the morning. We’ll go back to mine after we eat and I’ll show you how to install and use it. I already paired them, which means that no one can just get the app and find where one of you is; the paired device has to be in Bluetooth proximity for the location to show.”

Eve carefully puts one of the devices back in its case; Villanelle does the same with the other. “You’re a fucking genius,” Eve says solemnly.

“Takes one to know one.” He is practically glowing, and pushes his glasses further up the bridge of his nose with his index finger. It reminds Eve briefly of Kenny, and a momentary swell of pain takes up residence somewhere between her ribs. This is, she knows, the kind of person he would have grown into.

Perhaps sensing her thoughts, but more likely reading her expression, Villanelle puts her hand on Eve’s knee under the table again, applying gentle pressure. Eve exhales, and the hurt dissipates a little. She finishes her drink. “Tell us how much we owe you for them.”

“I calculated it back at the apartment, minus the cost of this lunch, to which I am treating you two and don’t you dare quibble about it. Oh, and don’t worry, I have ice.”

“Why...do we need ice?”

x

“Ow, ow, fucking _ouch,”_ Eve hisses, crushing Villanelle’s fingers in her grip as the needle slides through the cartilage of her right ear, barely numbed with the ice cube she has been holding to Eve’s ear with her free hand and stinking of the disinfectant Demarius has just swabbed. Villanelle gives her a look that plainly says that if they weren’t in present company, she would be making comments about Eve’s pain tolerance.

“Almost done,” Demarius says, threading the earring through the hole he’s just made. Villanelle throws the ice cube into the sink across the room (“Ooh, nice shot.”) and holds Eve’s ear steady with cold fingers while Demarius affixes the earring back on and locks it. “Sorry. Cartilage is gonna hold it in place better. Bonus, it looks badass.”

“It does suit you,” Villanelle agrees, and pets Eve’s hair back from her face when the whole operation is complete. Her ear stinging, Eve breathes out hard as she sits up from where her head has been on Villanelle’s lap. “My turn?”

They swap places, and of course Villanelle is stoic as can be, the tiniest of breaths escaping from between her lips when Demarius punctures her ear in the same place. Eve watches the process in fascination, suddenly struck by the enormity of what they have just done. No more searching, no more chasing. Certainly no more digging cake boxes out of dumpsters. It feels like a gift. It feels more intimate than any marriage proposal, real _or_ fake. Villanelle’s bright eyes meet her own, her head neatly pillowed on Eve’s thighs while Demarius works, and Eve can tell she’s thinking much the same.

“There we go,” he says, wrapping the needles up to dispose of safely and peeling off the latex gloves he’s been wearing. “And you’ve got the app set up. I’ll give you a shortened URL that you can use to redownload it if for, uh, scary spy reasons you need to get new phones. Give me a call if anything stops working and I can try to debug at a distance, since I assume you’re not staying in the city.”

Eve shakes her head no, a little ruefully. Pieces of her old life are not exactly a siren song, but it has been nice to reminisce for a while. Villanelle is counting out fifties from the quantity of cash in her backpack, and when she hands a neat stack to Demarius, Eve can tell it’s about twice what he had quoted them. “The extra is for your discretion,” she says, and Eve really should not find it so hot when her voice drops like that. “And for that photo of baby Eve. I’ll give you another hundred if you let me keep it.” Okay, moment _definitely_ over.

They part ways jovially, with Demarius hugging Eve tight, and then offering his hand to Villanelle again when he goes in for an embrace and it is immediately clear she’s not into it. “Keep yourself safe, okay?” he says to Eve. “I’m gonna be really pissed if I have to read your obituary.”

“I’ll be okay,” Eve says, though she’s not sure if she’s telling the truth or not. “If anyone comes asking about me—”

“I’ll say nothing and let you know immediately,” Demarius finishes. “And it’s good to meet you, Villanelle. If this were twenty years ago I’d be giving you the college-best-friend hurt-her-and-I’ll-kill-you talk, but that feels a little juvenile.”

Villanelle grins. “Message received, though we both know that Eve can take care of herself.” Unspoken: _“Also, I’ve killed more people than live in this apartment building, so that probably wouldn’t go so well for you.”_

x

They take a taxi back down to their AirBnB, which is exorbitantly expensive but less stifling than the subway. Once back on the street, they make a quick stop at a nearby drugstore for saline solution and Q-tips (“The last thing we need is for our very romantic new gadgets,” Villanelle says as she gets a box from the shelf, “to give us infections.”), and return to the apartment.

Eve is tired, having not slept overly well the night before and feeling grumpy from the soreness of her ear. She says as much as they walk in the door and put their sundry bags down.

“So sleep for a while,” Villanelle suggests, flipping her head upside down to put her hair up on top of her head in a tight bun. The shell of her right ear is reddened around the piercing. “I’m going running, I didn’t this morning and it feels weird. We’ll regroup when I get back and you wake up. You can tell me more college Eve stories.” She flashes an impudent smile.

“Like hell. If you ever say the phrase ‘butterfly clips’ in my presence again, you’ll be sorry.”

She should know better than to say things like that; immediately, Villanelle gives her a sultry look, a saucy dip to her shoulder. “Oh? You’ll punish me? Sounds _sooo_ unpleasant.” Eve, despite herself, laughs and playfully smacks her on the waist, and then somehow Villanelle has her pressed hard against the doorway to the bedroom with her mouth firm and open against Eve’s. Which Eve lets herself fall into, at least until Villanelle tries to put her hand in her hair.

_"Ow,_ fuck,” she says for the tenth time that afternoon, and takes Villanelle’s wrist to pull her hand down from where she’s just brushed the new piercing.

“Sorry, sorry.” But Villanelle’s grinning. “You’re too hot, I forgot it was there.”

“Flatterer. Besides, you haven’t done your self-imposed penance. Go running.”

“Fine,” Villanelle breathes out against Eve’s lips, brushing against them once more before pulling back and going to her suitcase for athletic clothes. Eve sprawls out on the bed, then curls up on her left side, absently watching Villanelle change and fish around for her running shoes. “How long are you going to sleep?”

“A couple hours, probably. Why?”

“Just calculating how long I’ll be bored without my favorite conversation partner.” _God,_ but she’s a flirt. And a vision in floral leggings. She comes to sit on the edge of the bed, just long enough to lean over and kiss Eve’s forehead. “Sleep well.”

And she goes, locking the front door behind her. Eve turns the light in the bedroom off, and falls asleep as soon as she closes her eyes.

x

The clock on the bedside table shows that two hours have passed when Eve comes to again, marginally more well-rested and with her ear feeling less like a balloon full of hot air. “Villanelle?” she calls out, voice a little groggy. She must, Eve thinks, be in the other room, probably on her laptop. They will figure out something for dinner, and continue their quest for documents, and—

There’s no response.

Eve checks the clock again. It’s actually been a little _over_ two hours, far longer than Villanelle ever goes running at a time. “Villanelle?” she says again, fear starting to pour into her veins like ice. She darts from the bed to the living room, which is notably empty. Villanelle’s backpack is still on the couch, though it’s open now. It wasn’t before.

She looks into the bathroom, the tiny kitchen. The apartment is not large. Villanelle is not there.

“Fuck, fuck, _fuck,”_ Eve says to herself, panic starting to tighten her throat as she scrabbles for her shoulder bag. All sorts of horrific scenarios are flashing through her mind—Villanelle ambushed and shoved into an unmarked van, Villanelle shot in the heart from a sniper rifle through a window, Villanelle rammed down by a car in an intersection. Somehow, she gets out her phone, unlocking it with shaking hands. She opens the app Demarius had shown her how to download less than five hours ago.

A text message comes through. A text message? No one texts this phone, no one has the number, except for—

_Come and find me, just like the old days? x V_

It’s punctuated with a kiss emoji.

Eve laughs until she cries, leaning against the wall and sliding down it until the adrenaline has ebbed out of her. She knows she must sound like a crazy person, giggling to herself in an empty apartment with a few hot tears sliding down her cheeks, but fortunately there’s no one else around to hear it. This time when she opens Demarius’s app, her fingers are steady, punching in the passcode she had created just a few hours prior.

It looks a bit like Google Maps, with a small button in the corner reading “SEARCH.” It’s blue, indicating that the paired device (still painful on Eve’s ear) is within range, and the function can be used. Eve presses it, and a dot appears on the map of Manhattan, in the bottom left corner of Central Park. Just like that. What had once taken an entire MI6 team weeks of work, thousands of pounds, and innumerable casualties. Reduced to the press of a button. It’s a dizzying rush.

Eve takes Villanelle’s backpack along with her shoulder bag, and hails a cab once she’s out on the sidewalk. “Columbus Circle,” she says, the nearest entrance to Villanelle’s dot, which she watches move about. Despite the fact that it’s _literally_ the least work she’s ever done to find her, Eve feels a bit of the thrill of the chase creeping in around the edges of her mind, remembering Moscow, remembering Paris, remembering Aberdeen. How her mind would thrum with her name while in pursuit, _Villanelle, Villanelle, Villanelle_ timed with the fast beating of her heart.

In retrospect, Eve thinks, she really should have accepted that she was into her _way_ sooner.

The cab pulls up by the entrance to the park, and Eve pays the driver, gets out and eyes her phone. The paths in the park are teeming with tourists, families, groups of young friends laughing together. She sees her own dot nearing closer and closer to Villanelle’s on the map as she walks, until they are nearly close enough to be on top of each other, and Eve is looking around for a familiar flash of blonde hair, for those floral leggings, for—

A voice rings out. “Eve!”

And there she is, against the orange fire of the setting sun reflected on the nearby buildings and the green, green trees, standing atop a rock formation. She’s drawn up to her full height, grinning like anything and holding a gallon-sized Ziplock bag between her finger and thumb, lifting it to show off.

“What’s that?” Eve calls up to her, and Villanelle throws it down. Eve barely catches it, and turns it over, revealing six passports, a smattering of bank cards emblazoned with a few different names, and a couple of New York State driver’s licenses, featuring unflattering photos of the two of them. She looks back up to where Villanelle is silhouetted, running shoes planted firmly on four-hundred-and-fifty-million-year-old stone. She is so beautiful that Eve could pass out, could write a fucking poem about it.

“Penance,” she says, her eyes alight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i. i think we can all agree that the eyebrow journey sandra oh has been on is truly inspiring
> 
> ii. me? writing my favorite nyc restaurant into a fanfiction? it's more likely than you think (ROKC on 141 and broadway if you're ever in the city 👀)
> 
> iii. i don't necessarily know that this needs to be said, but: DO NOT PIERCE YOUR OWN CARTILAGE IN A COLLEGE FRIEND'S HOME EVEN IF IT'S TO BE OUTFITTED WITH ROMANTIC GADGETS, PLEASE VISIT A PROFESSIONAL
> 
> iv. thank you so much for the love on this so far!! writing a multi-chapter thing is a roller coaster but i'm having a great time. shit's gonna get real next chapter. buckle up 
> 
> v. as always, you can come say hello on tumblr @ villanellogy :)


	4. EIGHTY SEVENTH STREET

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Eighty-Seventh Street: As To Rental Car Offices, Femoral Arteries, Road Trips, Showers, and Pasta Carbonara**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw violence & some Sauce

It all goes wrong in a rental car office.

After, Eve thinks about the factors which preceded it. Being on the run, she has learned, is not about aspiring toward actions with _zero_ risk. So long as someone, or especially a collective of someones, wants to kill them, no move can be made sans risk. It is a matter of reducing risk, anticipating it, and keeping their eyes peeled for its consequences. Relying on the overwhelming amount of data that humanity churns out day after day to help mask activity—one _could_ isolate a specific drop of water from a lake, but it would be a hell of a job to locate it, and by the time one did, the water might be long-gone.

After, Villanelle blames herself, but Eve knows that it was only a matter of time.

They rise early on their last morning in Manhattan, and Villanelle does a show-off amount of pull-ups on the bedroom’s doorframe in lieu of running. Eve goes through the apartment and cleans the remaining groceries out of the kitchen, throws out a couple of takeout containers left in the refrigerator. They secure the apartment’s keys back in the lockbox on the stoop’s railing, and they hail a cab, suitcases in hand along with Eve’s shoulder bag and Villanelle’s backpack. They direct the taxi to the office where Villanelle has reserved a modest car for them, one-way to Baltimore.

The plan, made the evening prior over a pizza the size of a truck tire, is to hide out near there for a bit and then cross the ocean again, likely to Oslo. Villanelle doesn’t speak Norwegian, save a few Googled phrases, but Eve hopes this helps throw suspicion from it as a possible destination for anyone trying to track them down. Eve, faced with another grueling month of constant movement like the first time around, feels fatigue setting in around the corners of her mind. She pushes it aside for now.

“One day at a time,” Villanelle says often, and though it had started out as a joke, a reference to Billie’s brief stint at AA meetings, it’s become somewhat of a mantra between them as well. Eve thinks it to herself now, her eyes closing as she leans her head against the taxi’s backseat and listens to the sounds of the city streets.

The rental car office is in the bowels of a parking garage on East 87th Street, and when they drag their suitcases through the glass door, it is clear that Eve and Villanelle are the only people in the place aside from the receptionist, a blond young man who is playing on a handheld game device. The office is small, with an ancient television on an ancient stand playing the news on mute, and a few chairs that serve as a waiting area. When they come in, the receptionist casts his game aside and straightens up.

“Good morning,” he says, flashing a crooked smile. “Sorry, it’s usually pretty slow in the mornings.”

“No worries,” Villanelle says in her best imitation of Eve’s accent, which is always a little unsettling to listen to. “I’ve got a reservation, they told me over the phone I could pay in cash. Silly me, I’m always losing my debit cards and having to mail out for replacements. Luckily my wife is smarter than I am, and keeps a fair bit of cash around.” She nudges Eve, who offers her most placid smile. Watching Villanelle slip into a character will truly never get old.

“Totally get it. Can I just see your license?” Villanelle hands it over, and Eve experiences a twinge of anxiety; this is the first time either of them have used any of their new false documents.

Another customer enters the office. He’s wearing a blue baseball cap, and upon seeing that the desk is occupied, goes over to one of the chairs and sits down with his phone. Eve examines him reflexively, but is pulled away from it by the receptionist.

“Ma’am, will you be driving the car as well? If so, I’ll need your license.”

“Oh, yes, sorry,” Eve says, and gets it out of her wallet, sliding it across the counter. He examines it and hands them both back (Villanelle meets Eve’s eyes with a twitch of her lips), then unlocks a drawer of his desk and pulls out a key ring. The dot matrix printer by his desk roars to life and spits out a contract, which he sets on the counter with a pen he hands to Villanelle.

“So just sign there at the bottom, and then—”

There is a shot. The receptionist, hand inches away from Villanelle’s, is propelled backwards, bright florets of red blossoming on his chest, saturating shapes into his white polo shirt.

Eve and Villanelle whirl at the same time. The man in the baseball cap is standing again, and has a short pistol raised. As they turn, he levels it towards Eve. She barely has time to process it, seeing the perfect _O_ of the barrel, before Villanelle slams into her side and sends her flying, _hard,_ hitting the opposite wall. By the time Eve collects herself, a few seconds later, Villanelle has already launched herself at their attacker.

Watching her fight is like seeing an avenging angel, all wrath and terrible beauty. (Of course, Eve doesn’t think this in the moment, preoccupied with potentially getting shot—she thinks it later, and often.) Her hazel eyes turn wild, and she seems ten feet tall. She lunges directly for the man’s gun arm; he gets off a shot which hits the window and shatters it, the report like a bomb going off in Eve’s ears, before she delivers a blow to his elbow so powerful that his hand opens, and the weapon drops. It skids across the floor and under the TV stand, difficult to retrieve without getting on one’s hands and knees.

Villanelle is merciless with her attacks, punching him hard across the face once, twice, three times with her hair flying. His hat is thrown from his head, revealing sandy hair and an ugly scar high on his forehead. Their assailant has clearly been taught how to fight himself, though, and dodges her fourth blow as blood starts to drip from his nose. They trade hits, blocks, the dizzying speed of it impossible to keep up with. Villanelle almost gets her hands around his throat, but he ducks away at the last second, putting a few feet of distance between him and her, and lifts a steel-toed boot.

He kicks Villanelle hard in the solar plexus, and she drops with an awful, guttural sound, rolling to the side.

Eve feels the blow in her chest like it was dealt to her. _“No!”_ She hears the twisted-up cry, and then realizes it’s come from her.

“You want to fight?” he growls, bearing down on a supine Villanelle and kicking her again, this time in the stomach. “I’ll give you a fight, you little _bitch._ Hélène sends her greetings.” Villanelle makes another sound, like a caged animal, and he steps on her while she writhes.

Eve’s switchblade is in her hand. With crystal clarity, she remembers photos from Vienna, the hours that she spent with the pads of her fingers pressed hard above her femoral artery, thinking of the utter simplicity of it all. Sitting in an office chair in her marital home, she had said to herself, _I bet I could do that._ And immediately afterwards, of course, chided herself for even considering such a thing.

The man still has his boot planted firmly on Villanelle’s chest; she’s clawing at his ankle with her fingernails and thrashing. Eve can’t see her eyes, but her mouth is twisted up in pain. Another few moments, and she could _probably_ get out of it, but Eve is already moving forward, riding adrenaline and momentum and something which claws at her belly and feels an awful lot like _hunger._

“Hey!” she shouts as she lunges, too loud in the tiny room. He half-turns, which is enough.

Here is what killing someone feels like: slow. Like Eve can feel each millimeter of skin and muscle giving way as she pushes the knife in, each rivulet of hot blood that wells between her fingers, can see each micro-expression (shock, pain, anger, then nothing) that crosses the man’s face. Like watching a lightbulb fade, lumen by lumen, until nothing remains but cold darkness.

Here is what killing someone feels like: fast. Like in the span of a blink, a man goes from being a man to being a crumpled heap on the tiled floor of a rental car office, what seems like gallons and gallons of startlingly red blood seeping from him. Eve pushes him so that when he falls, he doesn’t land atop Villanelle. There is so much blood. Eve doesn’t remember Raymond having that much blood.

Villanelle, coughing hard, gets to her knees. Eve drops the knife and helps her up, looping an arm around her waist though she’s wincing in pain. “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think he broke anything,” Villanelle manages, her voice thin and strained, touching her chest, her stomach, her ribs. “S’gonna bruise bad. Are _you_ hurt?”

“No.” All of the blood covering Eve’s right side belongs to the man on the ground. “I’m okay. I’m okay. What do we need to do?”

“Search him, take his phone,” Villanelle says, then coughs again and winces, pressing a hand to her side. She looks down at the carnage on the floor, as if taking it in fully. “Jesus. Good hit. You went for the—”

“Yeah.” Eve roots through the man’s jacket, finds a phone and wallet. “Call it an homage.”

A flattered yet perturbed expression crosses Villanelle’s features as she takes the phone out of Eve’s hand and wakes it up. “Rookie,” she mutters, and reaches down for the dead man’s hand, roughly taking his thumb and pressing it against the screen to unlock it. Eve watches, feeling dreamily detached from the whole scene. After Raymond, she had felt hot bile rise in the back of her throat, had been choked by the panic and the realization of what she’d just done. After Dasha, she’d felt keyed up, thrumming with revenge. Now, she feels...remarkably calm. Proud of herself, even, for preventing further harm to Villanelle, for the brevity of the plan and execution.

But still kind of grossed out. “Are we gonna...have to cut off his thumb and take it with us?”

Villanelle looks at her like she’s nuts, which is a little rich considering everything going on. “No, of course not. We’re not taking the phone, it’s certainly being tracked by the Twelve. We just need to see what he knows. Get the keys from the desk, and that gun from under the TV stand.” While she’s speaking, she’s flicking through apps, emails, anything that will open without a passcode.

Eve does as she’s told, grateful for Villanelle taking charge. It’s the same way she felt in Rome before everything soured, the relief of letting herself sink into Villanelle’s steady hands undoing her outer layer, guiding her down the stairs. She picks up the keys from the desk, carefully avoiding the body of the receptionist, and loops them securely on her thumb. Then she gets down on her knees, just to the left of the blood splashed across the floor, and carefully extracts the gun, clicking the safety on as soon as she has her hands on it.

“Now what?” she says when she stands up again, putting the gun into her shoulder bag next to a couple of tampons.

Villanelle looks up from the phone, eyes Eve up and down. “You need to change. We can’t risk someone seeing you looking like you fell in red paint. Though...good look on you. Kind of sexy.” Eve scoffs. “I know, not the moment. Go to the bathroom, wash off as much as you can.”

Eve does so, handing over the keys and getting a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt out of her suitcase before she does. It’s a hurried, cold, damp operation, and the sink clogs and ends up half-full of water tinged pink with blood, but at least Eve doesn’t actively look four seconds out from stabbing someone to death. She bundles the bloody clothes into the bathroom’s small garbage can, and then lifts the bag out of the can and ties it off.

When she re-emerges, Villanelle is typing furiously on her phone, looking back and forth between its screen and the one of the dead man’s phone. “They found the AirBnB and followed us here. Which probably means they saw the video, connected Clara and Élodie from the Laval hotel, and then traced Élodie’s card to the Western Union and the apartment.”

Eve feels a sudden thrill of fear for Demarius. “When did they find the apartment?”

“Not until late last night, like two A.M., according to the messages. He was instructed to camp out near the stoop across the way and wait until we left. I’ve got the number the texts came from written down, though it’s probably a throwaway.” Relief washes over Eve in a wave. “Good, you have the clothes. Grab your things, look normal. We’ll go find the car.” Villanelle takes another look around them, assessing the scene a final time, and leads the way out of the office back into the garage.

Finding the car is more harrowing than Eve had anticipated. Villanelle clicks the key fob again and again, listening for the sound of a door unlocking as they weave through the rows of parked vehicles. Finally, a car’s lights in the third row spring to life when she presses the button, and they beeline for it. Eve tries not to look over her shoulder too many times—if there was any backup, surely it would have already manifested, but it’s difficult not to be on edge in the wake of the past few minutes.

Villanelle puts their suitcases in the trunk, slams it shut, and then hurls the Twelve lackey’s phone at the concrete behind the car’s rear wheels with all her might. The screen shatters with a crunching noise, thin slivers of glass tumbling over each other. Eve watches, momentarily fascinated by the morbid beauty of it, before Villanelle’s voice snaps her out of her reverie.

“Let’s go,” she says, and closes her hand softly around Eve’s wrist for a second. “You good?”

Eve looks at her, her mussed hair, her focused eyes. “I’m good,” she responds, and is surprised by how much she means it.

“Okay.” Villanelle releases her hand and circles to the driver’s seat. She opens the door and slides in, graceful even in the wake of being kicked in the ribs. Eve does the same at the passenger door, putting her shoulder bag and Villanelle’s backpack between her feet. The car hums to life. The air conditioning turns on, blasting too hard, and a preset channel on the radio buzzes with static. “Ready?”

“Let’s go.”

And Villanelle puts the car into gear, running neatly over the shattered remains of the dead man’s mobile phone, driving toward the entrance of the parking garage and back into the dizzying morning sun.

x

They drive for ten hours, paying tolls in cash and carefully keeping to the speed limit. They stop twice, once for gas and once for food, inhaling fast-food burgers before switching seats and pulling back onto the highway. Eve knows that upon finding out their lackey was stabbed to death in a rental car office, the Twelve’s first step will likely be to check and see where cars have been rented out to. Reassessing, they abandon the idea of Baltimore in favor of tracing their way further down the East Coast, finding somewhere small and nondescript to hunker down in and figure out next steps. This plan is made in between harrowing turns as Villanelle weaves through Manhattan, unfamiliar with the traffic patterns but quick to join the culture of laying on the horn at the slightest provocation.

They drive through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee. “America is _so weird_ ,” is Villanelle’s commentary, to which Eve can’t help but agree. Other than that, they don’t talk much. Eve, adrift for what to do and avoiding sitting with her thoughts for as long as possible, finishes the terrible James Patterson novel she’s been carrying around in her bag. They finally come to a stop just over the border of North Carolina, in a mountain town with brightly painted statues of bears scattered about the main street.

Villanelle finds via Google Maps a nondescript inn tucked away from a main road, charming with its quantity of dark wood and sprawling porches. It’s not far to the small downtown of Hendersonville, and has quick access to the major highways should they need to make a fast getaway. There’s a regional airport about fifteen minutes down the road, and an international airport another hour south. And, given the winding mountain roads and the thick forest, there are ample places to abandon a rental car.

The first thing Eve says when the door to the rented room shuts behind them is “I need a shower.”

“Understandable,” Villanelle responds, throwing her backpack onto the bed. “I’ll sweep the room.”

Grateful, Eve abandons her shoulder bag along with it and goes into the bathroom, peeling off clothes as she walks. Though she is no longer bloody, her quick rinse in the sink at the rental car office has left her still feeling unclean. _Very Lady Macbeth,_ Eve reflects ruefully, as she turns the shower on as hot as it will go, discards her undergarments to the tile floor, and steps in.

It hits her with the water, the weight of it. As steam spirals up to the ceiling, Eve puts up three fingers on her left hand, examining them. Three people dead by her doing (though Dasha was a team effort). How long until the number exceeds the fingers on her hand? Both hands?

The heaviness that Eve feels is not regret. She knows this instinctively—she would not make another choice, given the ability to turn back time. She hadn’t even regretted killing Raymond; when she woke up in the hospital in Rome with a punctured lung and extensive tissue damage, her first feeling had been a deep, abiding sadness that she’d chosen Villanelle, and Villanelle had lied to her. What disturbed her about Raymond, all the nights she thought about it carving up cuts of meat in the stifling restaurant kitchen, was how easy the choice had been to do it. How stupid she felt for being taken in, and how stupid she felt for missing Villanelle even in the wake of so much pain.

Now that the two of them are on an even keel, the choice had been even simpler. Villanelle was in danger, and then by Eve’s actions, she was not. It is a delightful simplicity.

This is, Eve decides as she threads hotel conditioner through her curls, what being powerful feels like.

Long minutes later, her skin reddened from the water’s temperature, she steps out onto the thin bath mat. Though bar soap wouldn’t have been her first choice, she does feel physically cleansed. And there’s no blood under her fingernails anymore, which is always a nice state to be in. She squeezes out her hair, pats it dry, and wraps the white hotel towel around herself.

The mirror is fogged up. Eve swipes a hand across it, examining her face in the droplet-dotted reflection. Same skin, same lines around her eyes and mouth she’s growing to like since Villanelle has started kissing them. Same hair, weighed down by water but already starting to spring back up in its unruliness. But she meets her own eyes, and there’s a look there that she scarcely recognizes—wild, and fiery, and mean. The heaviness she had felt standing under the shower has given way to electricity under her skin which is almost too much to bear, like she could split open and pour out everywhere. She wants to tear off running down the isolated streets under the mountain sky, or dive off a cliff into a cold sea, or...

She steps out of the bathroom. Villanelle is sitting propped against the headboard of the bed, and she looks over to Eve when she emerges. “Hey,” she says, as Eve moves toward her, and then she must see something in Eve’s eyes too, because her head tilts almost imperceptibly. “What—”

Eve drops the towel and straddles her thighs in one fluid movement. Villanelle is struck speechless, a rare occurrence for her, looking up with parted lips. “Am I hurting you?” she asks, and Villanelle shakes her head, shifting so her arm is at Eve’s waist, her hand cupping the protuberance of Eve’s hip. “Good. Will I hurt you if you fuck me?”

Finally, she finds her voice again. “Unless your desired foreplay is punching me in the chest, I think I’ll be okay. I took a nearly illegal amount of acetaminophen.” There’s a question in the way she looks at Eve, but there’s hunger, too, as she glances over Eve’s body, runs her hand up her midriff to her breasts.

Eve laughs, and the sound is hollow, crackling out into the air between them. “Be as rough as you can.”

In answer, Villanelle cups her face and draws her down, sealing their lips together. For a moment, it seems that she hasn’t heard Eve’s request, or is ignoring it...but then she bites down on Eve’s lower lip, _hard,_ and the shock of it rocks hard through Eve’s body, landing at her core and burning there. “You know that is a dangerous thing to ask me,” she says, pressing the words into Eve’s jaw. Her hands are firm as she grips her hips again. She can toss Eve around like it’s nothing, even injured.

“Yeah, well,” Eve says, though it’s breathier than she intends due to Villanelle pulling her closer, slipping a hand between her thighs and entering her with no preamble. “We’re dangerous. Seems to _—oh—_ fit.”

“You’re right,” Villanelle murmurs, looking straight into Eve’s eyes as she hooks her fingers firmly, sending a jolt of _God, too much_ but _God, there_ up Eve’s spine. “You were brilliant today. I’m sorry you had to do it.”

Eve, uninterested in apologies but thrilling at the compliment, rolls her hips against Villanelle’s hand. “Does it still turn you on? Seeing me like that?” She is remembering the ravenous look in Villanelle’s eyes after Raymond. Even at the time, when shock and terror were Eve’s prominent emotions, she had seen the look for what it was, and felt a most untimely swoop in her stomach.

“What kind of question is that?” Villanelle sets up a hard, constant rhythm, her gaze never leaving Eve’s face. “A gorgeous woman sticking a knife in someone to save me? Modeling it after one of my own kills, no less?” The words hit heavy at Eve’s midriff, along with the edge of pleasure-discomfort Villanelle is walking with her strong, sure fingers. When she speaks next, it’s quiet, deadly serious, her full lips wrapped around the syllables like a prayer. “If we hadn’t needed to make a quick getaway, I would have ripped your clothes off right there.”

Eve laughs again, though it’s bitten off into a groan a moment later. She feels Villanelle’s touch everywhere at once, her thoughts mercifully overtaken by desire. Her head tips back, her eyes close. It is so good, so good to give herself over to it, to not quite know whether the gasps tumbling from her lips are in pain or ecstasy, to let Villanelle ravish her until she’s trembling.

“Is this what you need?” Villanelle asks at one point, growling the words into Eve’s neck before dragging her teeth over her throat.

“Yes,” Eve says, feeling like she could swallow the sky. “Yes, yes, yes.”

x

“Was that fucked up?”

Eve asks it looking up at the popcorn ceiling, curled into Villanelle’s side with her head carefully resting on her shoulder. The lines on her shoulders where Villanelle’s nails dug in are still stinging, raked there while Eve knelt between her legs on the hotel carpet to coax gasped expletives from her with her tongue. The frenetic energy she’d felt under her skin has finally dissipated, and the pain from the scratches is grounding.

Villanelle lets out a little sigh; she’s being sweet in the aftermath, petting a hand through Eve’s rapidly drying hair. But a smirk crosses her features, unable to resist the entendre. “Are you asking me to review your oral sex skills? On a scale of what to what?” She receives a prod to one of the bruises discoloring the skin over her ribs in punishment. “Ow, rude.”

“You know what I meant.” Eve lays her arm back across Villanelle’s waist. She kisses Eve’s forehead before she responds.

“I know what you meant. Do you want the objective answer, or the us-answer?”

“Mm...both.”

“Objectively, probably.” She thumbs over Eve’s cheek, gently coaxes her head to tip sideways so they are eye-to-eye, barely an inch apart. “But I get it. I always wanted sex after a successful job. Something about the emotions running high, I think. Wanting to keep riding it. Needing an outlet. Sound relatable?”

Eve laughs, low in her throat. “To the letter. Now I’m just starving, though.”

“Also relatable.” Villanelle kisses her hairline, then her nose. “I doubt this place does room service, but I can go out and get us something. When I muster the energy to put on clothes again, that is. Not that I’m complaining about your reaction, but I kind of thought that you’d be mad at me.”

“Why?”

She’s silent just a beat too long, which is how Eve knows that she’s having difficulty saying it. “Since it was my fault he found us.”

Eve kisses her nose in return, the very tip of it. “You’re still on about that? It was probably going to happen eventually. Now we know what they know, and we can be smarter going forward. We dealt with it. One day at a time, remember?”

Villanelle smiles, the curve of it soft on her lips. “One day at a time,” she agrees. “What did I do to deserve you, Eve Polastri?”

“Not much,” Eve says drily. “I think we deserve each other.”

That gets a laugh, and then a lingering kiss, and then they just lay together for long moments. The peace of it is broken only when Eve’s stomach growls audibly, and Villanelle laughs, pulling herself up to dress. “What do you want to eat?” she asks.

Eve considers the question. What does one eat for dinner after committing murder in the morning, driving all day, and capping the early evening with three orgasms? “You think there’s pasta carbonara to be had somewhere in this town?”

“If there’s not, _mon cœur_ , we will find another town.” Villanelle stretches, then picks the keys to the car up from the television stand. “I’ll leave you with the gun, and if you get worried, you know how to find me.” She taps her ear, and makes for the door, picking up her backpack on the way.

“Hey,” Eve calls, when she’s almost at the door. She turns around. “Scale of one to ten?”

A peal of Villanelle’s laughter bubbles from her, like music. “Nine,” she responds, and blows Eve a kiss. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i. in this house we stan dark eve
> 
> ii. i'm bad at writing fight scenes AND sex scenes so we really went for gold with this chapter huh 
> 
> iii. villanellogy on tumbler dot com, as usual!! or you can chat w/ me in the comments


	5. HENDERSONVILLE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Hendersonville: With Reference To Subarus, Telenovelas, Carolyn Martens, and Plans**

Forty-eight hours out from their fast break from New York, Eve’s heart has finally stopped pounding every time somebody looks at them, though she’s still examining the face of every passerby when they emerge from their room at the mountain inn. In a lot of ways, their shared life has gone back to how it was before the Laval fiasco; Villanelle goes running, they watch movies, they eat instant noodles and get takeout from local restaurants. For a full day, Villanelle insists on speaking to Eve in nothing but Korean (“I need to practice!”), and she’s really getting quite good at it.

Simply put, they are laying low, with the notable exception of their excursion to find an abandoned, unpaved maintenance road. It’s all sharp rocks and deep ditches, and looks like it hasn’t seen a car in years. Eve pulls the rental car onto it and drives it until it can’t fit through the trees, whereupon they cover it with rhododendron branches from the wild thickets of it all around. Villanelle buries the bag with Eve’s bloody clothes a hundred paces away. After, they walk to the road and hitchhike into town in the pickup of a very sweet woman named Mary-Mac, “with a hyphen right there in the middle,” who gushes over Villanelle’s accent, and falls hook line and sinker for their story of having gone for a hike and gotten hopelessly lost.

Following a hurried Google search, they set off in search of temporary wheels. One trip to a dilapidated used-car lot later, Villanelle leaves two thousand dollars lighter and with the keys to a nearly rusted-out Subaru in her palm. Eve thinks it was probably once a nice shade of blue, but it’s muddied with age. It’s entirely nondescript, and perfect for their purposes of using it for a week and then leaving it in an airport parking lot, likely never to be driven again.

“A Subaru? Really?” Eve can’t help but say when she sees it, choking back giggles. “Are you trying to be a walking stereotype?”

Villanelle, who is trying to put the ancient car into gear without throwing out her shoulder, looks over at Eve in utter confusion through the open window. “What?”

“Never mind.” Eve gets in the car. There is a suspicious stain on the front seat, which she delicately tries to avoid.

They actually _do_ go hiking later that afternoon, and Villanelle comes alive in the forest, walking along the trunks of fallen trees. She plucks dandelions from the side of the trail, and threads them into Eve’s hair. She is trying to be romantic, but when Eve looks at herself in the bathroom mirror when they return in their junker car to the inn, it has distinct forest-hag vibes.

Anxiety creeps in around the edges of Eve’s mind when she meets someone’s eyes on the sidewalk, or when the caretaker of the inn slams the garbage can lid outside the door to their room. But all in all, it’s nice. It feels good. If Eve is honest, the energy between them is somehow _stronger_ after New York and its aftermath. Or perhaps it’s just that the scratches on her shoulders haven’t quite healed yet.

When she finally plucks the last yellow flower out from her curls, Eve emerges to find Villanelle curled up on the bed, flicking through channels on the television. She lingers on a telenovela, where a doe-eyed actress is giving a monologue her all. Villanelle watches intently, and then turns to Eve and imitates a few lines of it, pitch-perfect.

“It’s so scary when you do that. Like you’re stealing their voices right out of their mouth,” Eve huffs as she flops down on the mattress next to her. “Should I be offended at what you just said to me? I took German in high school.” 

“I mean, I said that I would be devoted to you for the rest of my natural life, and that I wouldn’t let God or my evil grandmother stand in my way. Are you offended?”

Eve grins. “Who’s this grandmother? Sounds like a real bitch.”

“The _wooooorst."_ Villanelle rolls her eyes, drags the syllable out. “And don’t even get me started on God.”

“Blasphemer. We should put the news on.”

“Ugh.” Villanelle makes a face. “You think I want to see that ugly man again?”

“I thought he was kind of hot,” Eve teases, resulting in Villanelle leaning over the edge of the bed and pretending to retch. “I’m kidding, obviously, even if he hadn’t been trying to kill us he was kind of disgusting. But we should see what they’re saying about it.”

Villanelle is reaching for the television remote already. “You’re so sexy when you’re responsible in the wake of a murder.”

“How the tables turn.” Once the television is on and set to the national news, Eve coaxes Villanelle to slump back so she’s leaning with her back to Eve’s chest. She lightly skims a hand across where Villanelle is bruised, pushing her t-shirt up to see how they’ve changed color. There’s an ad for vacuum cleaners playing on the screen, a placid milk-white housewife picking up after a blow-dried golden retriever and two cherubic children. A nightmarish kind of life, in Eve’s opinion, though the bubbly acoustic guitar is clearly meant to indicate that this is desirable.

When the news comes back on, the story is playing. Eve supposes it must be a slow week for news, as the man stabbed in a rental car office in New York City, receptionist shot in cold blood, has been the subject of an absolute glut of press coverage, the sandy hair and scarred forehead splashed over every channel. It likely has something to do with the man being unable to be identified, which Villanelle is not surprised by. He’s likely legally dead, just like she is. The Twelve do not like paper trails for their recruits.

The reporter, on location outside the garage, is a young woman clutching her microphone, staring down the camera. “This unusual case has begun to attract international attention, as one victim remains unidentified and the perpetrator remains unknown. I have here with me Carolyn Martens, a representative from British intelligence.”

They both freeze. “Did she just say—” Villanelle asks, and then the camera angle changes and renders the question moot.

It is, indeed, Carolyn Martens, looking windswept and glamorous in a long burgundy coat, adjusting the small microphone on her lapel. “Thank you, Vivian,” she says. “As you say, the international community is invested in identifying this individual and getting to the bottom of this rather messy situation. I am but a small part of that, of course, but on behalf of my colleagues and I, we would appreciate any information the public can provide regarding this case.”

A number is put up on the screen in bold newsroom font. Eve immediately reaches over for a pen and scribbles it down.

“What are you doing?” Villanelle asks, disengaging from where she’s been tucked against Eve’s chest.

“Writing the number down. Ssh, we’ll talk in a minute.”

Onscreen, Vivian the reporter brings her handheld microphone back up to her lips. “And have you found any leads as to who the killer might be?”

“We are relentlessly pursuing every avenue of inquiry,” Carolyn responds, the model of diplomacy. Even through her shock and confusion, Eve manages to be impressed by her poise when speaking to the press. “We hope to lay this case to rest with all due haste, and ensure that whoever this young man may be, that he can be returned to his family.”

“Like he had a family,” Villanelle scoffs.

“Thank you, Carolyn,” the reporter says, and turns back to the camera. “The authorities are urging that if you have any leads as to the identity of the Eighty-Seventh Street Killer or their victim, you give the number on your screen a call.” Eve grimaces—it’s not the most stylish of epithets. “More on this story as it develops.”

As a graphic plays and the picture shifts to another headline, Villanelle picks up the remote and turns off the television, turning toward Eve with wide eyes. “Well, this is a development,” she says, with her usual flair for understatement.

“She must know it was us,” Eve says, worrying the corner of the paper she’s just written on between her index finger and her thumb.

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“What other explanation is there? There’s no way she just _happened_ to take an interest in a murder in New York.”

Villanelle shrugs. “So what if she does know? Clearly she doesn’t know where we are to come after us, if she’s doing television interviews and putting up a tip line.”

“So, what does she want? Obviously the number is her way of telling us to contact her, there’s no way MI6 goes around doing tip lines for American murder cases as a matter of habit.”

“I’m hungry,” Villanelle says, as if Eve hasn’t spoken, and hands over her phone with a local bar’s menu pulled up in a web browser. “Pick something and I’ll go get it to take away.” She is avoiding eye contact, deflecting with all the subtlety of an atomic bomb. Eve considers calling her on it, but thinks better of it, flicking through the options.

“The burger with sweet potato fries,” she says a few moments later, returning the phone. “We should at least call.”

“We’ll talk about it when I get back,” Villanelle says, as she gets up to extract bills from her backpack stash, and folds them into the pocket of her skirt. “Okay?”

Eve hesitates, not wanting to let the subject drop, curiosity starting to burn in her brain. Like an itch, impossible to scratch. “Yeah,” she agrees regardless. “Okay.”

Villanelle looks at her for another few seconds longer. She opens her mouth slightly, like she’s about to say something else, and then closes it and leaves, the door shutting firmly behind her.

x

Eve lasts about three minutes after she hears the Subaru sputter to life and drive off. She picks up her phone and the slip of paper with the hastily scrawled number, and heads out to the inn’s small parking lot to pace. It’s a warm night, humid, with a hint of the afternoon’s thunderstorm still lingering in the air. She holds the paper flat on her palm and punches in each number, lifting the phone to her ear as it starts to ring.

Someone with a voice Eve doesn’t recognize picks up. “If this is the same lad who’s been calling all evening asking if my refrigerator is running, please get a better hobby.”

“No, this is...” Confused, Eve pauses her pacing, resting her foot on a parking block. “I’m trying to reach Carolyn Martens, I saw the number on the television.”

“And who’s calling? Because let me tell you, I don’t get get paid enough to field all the psychos who have been calling this line just to breathe down it heavily.”

“Eve Polastri.”

The voice changes immediately, the irritated tone dropping in favor of surprise. “Oh. Shit. You’re the only one I’ve got instructions to patch through to the boss.”

Though rather ominous on its own, the statement at least confirms Eve’s suspicion that Carolyn’s presence on the news was a covert way of reaching out. “Okay, so...are you gonna?” she asks.

“Yeah, yeah. Sure. Only, who are you? She didn’t say, just left instructions to let her know if Eve Polastri called, day or night. I’m new, and working with Ms. Martens is kind of a dream of mine, so I just sort of...went with it. Didn’t realize it would mean playing secretary and listening to the Pervert Olympics.”

Eve can’t help but laugh, suffused with sympathy. “I’m an old friend,” she says in response, which is not strictly true but is a lot simpler than the truth. “Can you put me through to her, please?”

“Right! Right, yeah, sorry, I probably shouldn’t have asked that. Could you...maybe not mention it?”

“Your secret’s safe with me.”

A sigh of relief. “Ta. Here, I’ll transfer you now.”

Eve hears the line go dead, and then pick up again, and the familiar voice sounds in Eve’s ear. “Hello?”

“Carolyn,” Eve says, suddenly unsure how to start conversation with a woman who, the last time they were in the same room, shot a man in the head and sent another one to his knees begging for his life.

“Ah.” A few vague sounds, a rustle, and then the unmistakable closing of a door. “Eve. I had begun to think you might not call despite the tragic amount of newscasts I’ve splashed myself on assuming you’d see one eventually. You being on your honeymoon and all. Traditionally, one takes it _after_ the wedding, but I suppose you’ve never been traditional. I hear congratulations are in order.”

Eve is not sure what it is about Carolyn that makes her feel like a scolded schoolgirl. This exchange is no exception. “It’s not...you know we’re not actually engaged. It was a joke, and we didn’t realize someone was filming.” Even as she says it, she cringes internally at how it sounds.

“...Right.” Carolyn is apparently feeling merciful, and doesn’t press the issue. “So. New York.”

“How did you know it was us?”

“Goran Osterholm,” Carolyn says, each syllable clipped and precise. “A Swedish native with a shadowed past, long in our dossiers as someone to watch out for. Pronounced officially dead in 2016 after a motorcycle mishap in Malmö, yet killed for _real_ unusually violently on a two-day trip to New York City. Gunshot wounds, but no gun at the scene. One eyewitness account, quickly bribed quiet of course, of a car leaving the garage prior to a poor soul stumbling across the scene, said car containing two women.”

Eve turns the name over in her mind, assigning it to the image of the man who attacked them. It is strangely comforting, knowing the name of someone whose life she has taken. “Fair enough,” she cedes. “So...what do you care? If I recall, the last time we spoke, you seemed to think that there was no point in the endeavor you hired me for.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, Eve, but I hired you to find Villanelle, which you did with rather more enthusiasm than anticipated.”

“Yeah, okay, like you’ve made perfect dating choices over the years,” Eve snaps, then immediately regrets it.

She needn’t, though, as what comes over the phone line is a light, amused chuckle. “Fair enough,” Carolyn responds in kind.

Partially out of curiosity and partially to head off any further comments about her romantic decisions, Eve cuts back to the heart of the matter. “Why did you want me to call you? Why go through all the trouble of going to New York, doing the news report?”

“You remember my daughter, Geraldine?”

Eve thinks back to the reedy young woman in Carolyn’s house, by her side wearing black at Kenny’s funeral. “Of course.”

“She was attacked, six days ago. At an _ashram,_ of all places.”

Stomach in free-fall, Eve swallows, tasting acid. “God, Carolyn, I’m so sorry. Is she...?”

“No. Alive and in hospital, but quite understandably scared out of her wits.”

“And you think it was—”

Carolyn cuts her off. “I know it was. And I may be a terrible mother, but I am not quite so terrible that I would allow my only remaining child, who wants nothing more out of life than a yoga mat and well-spiced vegetarian food, to be killed. Nor so terrible that I would sit idly by until I myself am killed, which seems to be a likely end goal, all things considered.” She says all this with the mild tone of someone commenting on cirrus clouds. “It would seem the Twelve are attempting to tie up loose ends. Quite single-mindedly, too. This is the longest we’ve gone without an assassination since before Villanelle began working.”

Eve’s mind is spinning, trying to guess where this is headed. “So what do you want with us?”

“Call it gathering assets,” Carolyn says, which is just cryptic enough to not be an actual answer. “It would seem the three of us have a mutual stake in the situation, given that each of us has taken lives of the Twelve’s members and that our names comprise the top three spots on the metaphorical hit list, as it were.” Briefly, Eve imagines an actual list, perhaps on a dry erase board. She wonders who would be in the number-one spot, and then pushes the image out of her mind, since it is almost certainly Villanelle. “To be concise, Eve, I want to take the bastards down. And as much of a headache as you and Villanelle have historically been, having a bright ex-agent and a creative ex-assassin on my side would appear to be a net good toward that end.”

So there it is. Eve is silent, considering. When she speaks again, she is careful to keep her tone guarded. “So you want us to come back to work for MI6?”

“Good God, no. I should think it would be obvious this will be even less on-the-record than our initial mission was. Besides, if Paul was a rat, who knows who else could be?”

Eve rubs her temples with her hand not holding the phone to her ear. “I don’t think Villanelle is going to go for this,” she says, which is an understatement. She _knows_ Villanelle is not going to go for this.

“I can, of course, cash in a few favors,” Carolyn continues, as if Eve hadn’t spoken. “Procure a safehouse, weapons, whatever it is that might serve us. I seem to remember Villanelle had a rather expensive retainer in her day, which I doubt will be attainable on such a covert shoestring as what we will be operating on, but I can at least offer a flat you don’t have to leave within the week. I imagine you’ve been traveling rather extensively?”

“Understatement,” Eve admits.

“Takes a toll on the body. And all those hours on planes...havoc for the skin. Just think about it, Eve.” Carolyn’s voice is, as ever, even and brusque. “You can call me at this number if you’ll come.”

And she hangs up, the line going dead in Eve’s ear. She brings the phone down from her ear and stares at it, mulling over everything that has just been said.

x

“You called her,” is the first thing Villanelle says when she gets back with a paper bag of pub fare and a bottle of white wine from the tiny liquor store downtown.

Eve winces, having been wondering how to break the news, and having intended to leave it at least until they were sharing French fries in bed. “How did you know?”

“Because I know you, and you are very stubborn,” Villanelle responds. She isn’t full-on angry yet, but there’s a tautness to her mouth as she rips the bag open and hands over the takeout container with Eve’s burger. “I knew you would as soon as I walked out. Give me your Swiss Army knife.” Eve does, and she flips up the corkscrew and opens the wine, setting the bottle down just a little too loudly while she goes to the sink to retrieve the nondescript hotel glasses.

“I’m sorry,” Eve offers feebly, and Villanelle sends her a withering look from across the room. Wanting for something to busy her hands with, Eve closes the corkscrew and puts the knife back in her shoulder bag, then opens the box of food and arranges leaves of lettuce atop the burger. The slice of tomato looks as though it has seen much better days, and Eve discards it to the side.

Having dipped firmly into “petty” territory, Villanelle serves herself a splash of wine but wordlessly hands the bottle and empty glass to Eve to pour on her own. She sits in the room’s armchair, crossing one knee over the other and balancing her own food on it. “Are you going to tell me what she said?” she asks, raising both brows.

So Eve does. She explains as best she can, having to stumble back to fill in gaps (Geraldine has never come up in conversation, because why would she, and so Villanelle has no idea who she is). By the end of it, Villanelle is still and stony, not touching the food on her lap.

“No,” she says, when Eve finishes, which is about what she had expected.

“V, just think about it. This could be our chance to do away with them for good, to finally take all those pieces of shit down. Make them sorry for everything they did to you, to Carolyn, to me, to _us."_ Eve’s voice rises a little, breaks at its height.

“Not interested. They will carve you to bits and make me watch. They will kill Carolyn in front of her daughter, and then kill the daughter slowly. Eve, trust me, they’re nothing to mess around with.” Agitated, Villanelle casts her food to the ottoman and stands up, pacing the expanse of hotel carpet. Eve watches her, how her shoulders tense and her jaw knots.

“But they’re going to keep messing around with us. And with Carolyn’s resources and connections, we’ve got as good a shot, or better, as anyone to take them down.”

“Eve.” Villanelle pinches the bridge of her nose; her voice cracks, like she is about to cry. “There are two types of danger. There is being on the run, safe so long as we stay out of sight and cover our tracks, and there is turning around and facing them head-on. The former is far less likely to result in us dead than the latter.”

“There are two types of safety, too,” Eve says. She stands up too, and reaches for Villanelle. She looks for a moment like she’s going to jerk away from the touch, but ultimately permits it, her pacing feet slowing to a stop next to the bed. Eve cups her cheek, tucks her hair behind her ear. “There is being okay, but looking over our shoulder for the rest of our lives, and there is knowing that they are not _able_ to hurt us anymore. Don’t you want that? I want to give you that. I want you to be safe for real.”

Villanelle swallows, her eyes shining. Something wavers in her expression. Eve wonders, all at once, if Villanelle has ever been safe, has ever felt secure. Maybe, _maybe_ for a bit with Anna, though Eve finds it hard to believe any sixteen-year-old could feel real solace while sleeping with her languages teacher regardless of prior traumas. That story had been one of the hardest things for Villanelle to tell her, maybe even harder than what happened in Grismet.

“I don’t want to go back to the way I was,” she says, and something twists, hard, in Eve’s chest. “The last time I worked for them, for _you,_ you all treated me the same as the Twelve. Point me like a gun, pull the trigger.” She mimes a gun with her thumb and first two fingers, makes a popping sound with her tongue.

“I won’t let that happen,” Eve says, resolutely. “That was before, things are different now.” Villanelle is right, though it’s a hard pill to swallow. Sometimes she thinks about the things she said to Villanelle, or about her, and hot guilt smolders in her chest. Then again, Villanelle did shoot her and leave her for dead, so it’s not exactly been a one-way street.

The breath Villanelle lets out is blown through lips pursed into a small _O,_ a telltale sign that she’s holding back tears. “What would you do if I said no?” she asks, so quiet Eve can barely parse the words. “If I said I didn’t want any part of it, that I’d rather be looking over my shoulder in some tiny Catalonian beach town until the day someone puts a bullet in my head?”

The question gives Eve pause, and she realizes that she’s been approaching this conversation with the assumption that she can convince her. For the first time, the possibility that she can’t looms at the forefront of her mind. What _would_ she do? Stay at Villanelle’s side until they tear each other up, grow grizzled together in hiding, or die by the Twelve’s hand? Leave her, and take them on with Carolyn anyway, with a promise to return? Even thinking about that possibility sends a flutter of panic through her chest, which is a pretty good indication it’s not a tenable solution, but could she really abide by putting their fate in the hands of the universe?

Her hand is still resting at the side of Villanelle’s neck, and she drops it. “I don’t know,” she says, and Villanelle looks at her with hollow eyes that hurt to see. “Are you going to say no?”

“I don’t know.”

Eve watches her back away, go back to the chair and curl up in it. She picks a fry out of her takeaway container and nibbles the very end of it, staring into space. For lack of something to do with her hands, Eve sinks back down on the bed and does the same, though it tastes like sawdust on her tongue.

The moments stretch into minutes. Eve wants to say something, but each time she tries to speak, the words die in her throat, unsure of what shape they should take. Villanelle eats methodically, the sound of her chewing almost obscene in the silence of the room. The air conditioner cuts on. Outside the door, the bug zapper goes off.

“I love you,” Villanelle finally says when she turns to her again and breaks the silence, which is not at all what Eve had been expecting. Not only because it doesn’t exactly seem like the moment, after their tense conversation, but because they don’t say it particularly often even though it’s obviously true. Villanelle, perhaps still sore on the subject from Rome, usually only invokes the phrase when she’s adorably tipsy, which is unlikely to be the case as she’s barely sipped at her glass of wine.

“Okay,” Eve responds, unsure of the trajectory this is about to take. “I mean, I l—”

“So I will do it.” Villanelle interrupts her, the words coming out in a rush. “Not because of some grand sense of justice, and certainly not out of my own self-preservation, but because being with you is the first thing to make me feel like a human fucking being since I was a kid, and I know you’re not going to let this go.”

The words hurt in a way Eve can’t quite express, despite their indication toward an agreement of how to move forward. “We can talk about it more, you don’t have to decide right now.” she says, a little flimsily. “And it’s not...I don’t want to do it out of _some grand sense of justice._ It’s for you that I would go back to all of it.”

Villanelle eats another fry, sucks the salt from her thumb. “So you’ll do it for me, and I’ll do it for you.” She gets up and joins Eve on the bed. Her eyes are resolute, no remaining trace of the tears that had been brimming minutes ago. “You have to promise me something, though.”

“What do I have to promise?”

“If things start going sideways, you let me get us out. No going out like martyrs. The first sign of shit starting to spiral, we run to a campsite in rural Argentina, or a deserted island, or a bungalow in New Zealand, and we don’t look back at any of it.” She says all of this very evenly, her eyes fixed on Eve.

Eve takes a deep breath, and reaches out again, laying her hand over Villanelle’s where it is resting on the crumpled bedspread. “I love you, too,” she says, finishing the response that had been cut off earlier. Villanelle’s expression wavers, surprised and then soft. “So, yeah. I promise. I may be old, but I’m not ready to die yet.”

That coaxes a laugh from Villanelle. The energy thaws between them. She scoots closer, wraps her arms around Eve’s waist and tucks her head against her shoulder. “If anyone comes after us again, at least we have the Eighty-Seventh Street Killer on our side,” she quips.

Eve groans, and leans her cheek to Villanelle’s hair, touching lightly before righting herself again. “I’ll call Carolyn tomorrow night,” she says. “Steal away another idyllic forest hike before shit gets real again.”

“Can we go to a waterfall?”

“It’s like you’re reading my goddamn mind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i. mmm...i'll be honest, it's been tough writing the past week or so. i have about half the next chapter written and am hoping to get it done by next week but the Motivation™ is getting hard to come by so next update might be a bit late
> 
> ii. there's a plot to this fic? i know, i was surprised too. i'm still surprised. 
> 
> iii. i HAVE been playing around with a self-indulgent oneshot so keep yr eyes peeled for that i guess??? 
> 
> iv. villanellogy on tumblr as always xoxo if you're still reading this i appreciate you!!!!


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